Smartphones are getting mightier by the day. We have seen their benchmark scores level with those of laptops and even some desktops. With this increase of processing power, there are people who have resulted in using their device as a one stop shop for all their productivity work. Samsung has realized this and wants to make that experience better through a docking station called Samsung Dex.
Dex stands for Desktop eXperince, from that name, one can easily decipher that the feature will provide a desktop like workstation from your phone similar to Microsoft’s Continuum feature. Dex will be a docking station that will attach to external monitors via a HDMI cable and will project the contents of the upcoming Samsung Galaxy S8 to the big monitor screen. The S8 will wirelessly connect to the Dex station, so no extra cables will get in the way.
The evidence for this rumor maturing comes from a trademark filling made by Samsung. Dex will be a direct competitor to the Microsoft Continuum with their only difference being the fact that Samsung’s solution will run on android. This is not the first time that the Galaxy maker is working with such a device. It tried something similar back when they launched the Galaxy Note 2 which came with split screen multitasking. The company later ditched the docking station in favor of a wireless solution in the name of Side Sync.
This time round it seems that the dock will finally catch on. It’s potential success can be attributed to the fact that android now supports split screen multitasking natively; Samsung’s industry leading multitasking features which include floating screens, processors that can now support all kinds of monitor resolutions up to 4k, RAM capacities have reached up to 8GB on smartphones and a price tag of only $150 (KES 15,000). If the Korean giant uses its marketing might to push this device, it could pose a real threat to chrome-books that are now running android apps since the Dex is much cheaper than them while offering similar advantage.