Tried Samsung DEX last night and it's awesome

steelo · March 9, 2021

Hi everyone,

Last night, I decided to try Samsung DEX which I've always thought required their special 'dock' to work. To my surprise, Iwas able to stream wirelessly to my TV from my phone. I used the included USB-C to USB adapter to connect a wireless keyboard and mouse. I will say, at least on a S20 phone this worked flawlessly and really felt like a full-fledged PC. If you're willing to settle for using Google docs and sheets for productivity, everything feels very snappy and responsive. The OS seems to have all of the needed functionality of Windows or Linux. I even tried GeForce Now to play World of Warships and it was a really good experience. I do recommend purchasing a USB C to HDMI adapter because streaming (at least to a roku TV) is a bit laggy.

IMO, this could easily serve as a backup PC, if you have a Galaxy S8-S21 device. Why isn't this feature getting more attention?

George Vella · March 9, 2021

16 minutes ago, steelo said:

Hi everyone,

Last night, I decided to try Samsung DEX which I've always thought required their special 'dock' to work. To my surprise, Iwas able to stream wirelessly to my TV from my phone. I used the included USB-C to USB adapter to connect a wireless keyboard and mouse. I will say, at least on a S20 phone this worked flawlessly and really felt like a full-fledged PC. If you're willing to settle for using Google docs and sheets for productivity, everything feels very snappy and responsive. The OS seems to have all of the needed functionality of Windows or Linux. I even tried GeForce Now to play World of Warships and it was a really good experience. I do recommend purchasing a USB C to HDMI adapter because streaming (at least to a roku TV) is a bit laggy.

IMO, this could easily serve as a backup PC, if you have a Galaxy S8-S21 device. Why isn't this feature getting more attention?

Most people threw it under the bus since at start, it wasn't the best. Now that it's way better people are far busier thinking about the iPad (since the market decided android tablets are useless) as a laptop/desktop replacement, rather than your phone. If Dex was this polished at launch I'm sure it could've succeeded

steelo · March 9, 2021

56 minutes ago, George Vella said:

Most people threw it under the bus since at start, it wasn't the best. Now that it's way better people are far busier thinking about the iPad (since the market decided android tablets are useless) as a laptop/desktop replacement, rather than your phone. If Dex was this polished at launch I'm sure it could've succeeded

It's pretty impressive now...yes, too bad they fudged the launch so badly and got greedy requiring a $100 dex dock. I do hope it catches on though and becomes a little more polished. This could be the future if they play their cards right.

George Vella · March 9, 2021

1 minute ago, steelo said:

It's pretty impressive now...yes, too bad they fudged the launch so badly and got greedy requiring a $100 dex dock. I do hope it catches on though and becomes a little more polished. This could be the future if they play their cards right.

Yup, I personally only tried it 3 times, since I haven't used a Samsung phone in ages. (I daily drive an iPhone SE and a Redmi Note 8 Pro) I used it once when you still needed the dock (S9), another time using the cable only (Note 10) and recently wireless (S21). I used my friend's phone to try these out, and initially I hated it, even though I loved the idea. When I tried it both on the Note 10 and S21 I am really jealous of his phone. This is really making me want to go back to samsung.

steelo · March 9, 2021

1 minute ago, George Vella said:

Yup, I personally only tried it 3 times, since I haven't used a Samsung phone in ages. (I daily drive an iPhone SE and a Redmi Note 8 Pro) I used it once when you still needed the dock (S9), another time using the cable only (Note 10) and recently wireless (S21). I used my friend's phone to try these out, and initially I hated it, even though I loved the idea. When I tried it both on the Note 10 and S21 I am really jealous of his phone. This is really making me want to go back to samsung.

Right now I'm just using it wirelessly, which is pretty laggy. I've ordered the $30 dock (not the official dex one) Apple really needs to take a hard look at this. IMO, this puts galaxy phones far ahead of apple.

steelo · March 11, 2021

Update: Just got my Baseus dock for $30 off of Amazon. This thing is awesome...no more lag and I'm using Dex to make this post. As far as usability, it seems to be able to do 95% of everything I need it to. It's quite snappy opening apps and multitasking and I've gotten my S20 up to about 90% RAM usage with no major slowdowns. As expected, the Samsung web browser absolutely chews up memory. I also tried out world of warships and Witcher 3 via GeForce Now and the experience is almost flawless. I know you really can't compare ARM CPU's to x86, but 'feels' quicker than my i5 7400U work laptop as far as responsiveness in using Chrome, Word and excel. My laptop usually experiences a noticeable slowdown when ads come up or I'm looking at the comments section of a news site. My S20 running Dex does 'stutter' a bit scrolling on a site with several videos and ads, but it's not as dramatic. Call me crazy, but I could possibly see this becoming feasible as a hybrid phone/PC for office tasks and game streaming in the future.

There are a few annoying quirks, like sometimes I am not able to right click to copy-paste but the shortcut keys seem to work fine. The OS is actually surprisingly nice, but some things just seem a little unpolished. Being able to drag and drop files and adjust settings like icon size and the taskbar would be wonderful to have. Also, I'm not a huge fan of scrolling thru the app pages to find what I need. However, I've (kind of) remedied that by adding the most frequently used apps to my home page.