Samsung’s DeX Dock has clear implications for those who often alternate between a phone and a computer for work, and the first video advertisement for the station shows just how deep those implications are. The ad shows a travel journalist putting together an article about a city that she’s visiting. The journalist makes extensive use of her Galaxy S8 while exploring the city. Navigating, taking pictures, and other typical exploring tasks are taken care of by the Galaxy S8 itself. When the journalist gets to her hotel and slips her Galaxy S8 into its DeX Dock, she uses the full desktop OS on offer to actually put together an article on the city she’s in, with Samsung implying that its phone accessory is good enough for you to “leave your computer behind.”
The commercial shows the DeX Dock providing a full-featured desktop environment which looks relatively familiar to anybody who’s used Windows before. The desktop runs multiple windows seamlessly and passes contents between those windows with ease. Pictures dragged from the file browser expand once they hit the document editor window, and everything on the page could be moved around and edited in much the same way that one would accomplish on a traditional computer. The floating, expandable windows make for a friendly environment for both multitasking and taking on complex work inside individual windows, Samsung claims.
The DeX Dock has yet to hit mainstream success, but it seems to have avoided many of the mistakes of its predecessors, according to this commercial. The Motorola Lapdock, for instance, was often said to be slow and difficult to operate, and could only run Firefox and a small suite of select applications. Additionally, if you wanted to use a mechanical keyboard or a large monitor, you were out of luck. Solutions like the Superbook address many of those same weaknesses, but DeX addresses the desktop first, though it does retain a somewhat limited suite of apps in the name of a quality experience, rather than running any Android app like a second screen for the phone. On the other end of the spectrum from the Superbook, DeX cannot be used with most laptops; in order to use the DeX Dock, the display of your device must be able to accept an HDMI signal. This seems to imply that Samsung is confident that its Galaxy S8 and Galaxy S8 Plus are adequate for any mobile computing that a DeX Dock buyer may need to do, though it remains to be seen whether the company’s target audience agrees with that sentiment.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4u6BZAkjqM