Samsung Electronics on Thursday detailed the creation of the Samsung Desktop Experience (DeX) station that debuted alongside the Galaxy S8 and Galaxy S8 Plus, with two of the company’s Service Product Management Group officials also talking about the tech giant’s future plans for the platform. Minchul Kim and Hyoungsik Kim revealed that Samsung DeX has been in development since 2014 but wasn’t ready for a commercial release before the introduction of Android 7.0 Nougat and devices running this particular version of Google’s operating system out of the box. Three years ago, mobile chips still weren’t advanced enough to be able to emulate a true PC-like experience and HDMI solutions were too slow to offer the level of responsiveness that Samsung was striving for, in addition to Android itself being less flexible and completely unlike desktop platforms, the officials explained, adding that all of those issues were finally resolved with industry-wide advancements that debuted in the last 12 months.
Samsung is under no false pretense that its DeX station will make PCs obsolete, with the Seoul-based consumer electronics manufacturer simply looking to cater to users who own desktop towers and laptops yet tend to do the majority of their computing tasks on smartphones. The product was designed from the ground up with this particular demographic in mind and that strategy is unlikely to change in the foreseeable future, Kim said. The company’s ecosystem as a whole is already expanding on a relatively rapid basis and should continue doing so in the coming years, with the firm designing its solution as being compatible with essentially all apps compatible with Android Nougat and newer versions of the operating system; optimizing an app for Samsung DeX is a relatively straightforward task and something that Samsung is looking to help developers accomplish by providing them with a plethora of relevant documentation and FAQs, the company’s officials said.
Ultimately, DeX will likely expand to more devices in the near future and while no specific information on the matter has yet been provided by the company, recent rumors indicate that the upcoming Galaxy Note 8 will be compatible with the platform. An update on Samsung’s DeX-related endeavors will likely follow in the coming months.