• Michael
• On March 30, 2017

Galaxy S8 comes with a Display Dock for Continuum

Samsung yesterday unveiled its new flagship phone for 2017 – the Galaxy S8. The company also announced a new accessory for the phone – DeX. This is a docking station similar to Microsoft’s Display Dock that transforms the phone into a light PC with Android apps with keyboard, mouse and big screen.

Microsoft’s Continuum was announced in late 2015 with the Lumia 950 line, but the company has not introduced significant enhancements and features since then. Both solutions, from Microsoft and Samsung, have limitations and the experience is not perfect at this point, but it’s remarkable how Samsung came up with maybe even a better product than Microsoft. For example, while Continuum doesn’t allow you to use more than one app on the screen and you can’t resize the app windows, DeX offers a more PC-like environment with windowing.

The main difference between Continuum and DeX are the apps. While Samsung relies on non-optimized for bigger screens Android apps, Microsoft’s Continuum works with UWP apps which have adaptive interface depending on the screen.

But the introduction of DeX should be an alarm for Microsoft as Samsung has a much wider audience and the technology may progress faster in the coming years. Microsoft is rumored to be working on improvements for Continuum and they may be demonstrated during the annual BUILD conference in May.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GEPegrUMXaA