Last year as a Christmas present to myself, I got a monitor and docking hub so that I could hook my phone up to a bigger screen at my office. Obviously I’ve already got a work computer, but I do my best not to do anything personal on that machine. This is for when I have a break in my day (usually before/after work, or at lunch).
The sad thing is, until very recently it really wasn’t a good solution at all. Sure you could mirror your phone screen on the monitor, but if you wanted anything approaching a desktop experience, you had to enable some settings in developer mode, then download a couple of (mostly buggy) apps to simulate a task bar.
Needless to say, I rarely used it.
The September Android 16 update changed everything
A couple of caveats: You need a Pixel 8 or later, and you still have to enable developer mode and toggle a few settings. But it was easy enough that even this old guy was able to do it without too much frustration:
Go to Settings and tap on About phone.
Scroll down and tap the Build number 7 times.
Go back to Settings and select System.
Tap on Developer options.
Scroll down to the bottom and turn on the toggle switch next to Enable desktop experience features.
You will be prompted to restart your smartphone. Hit Reboot in the pop-up box.
Once your phone has restarted, connect it to your PC using a USB Type-C cable that supports visual output. The Desktop Mode will automatically be triggered when you plug in your phone.
The cool thing is, once you do those steps, it’s pretty much automatic from that point. You plug in your phone, and a whole separate desktop (capable of multi-window display) shows up on your monitor. It’s got a taskbar where you can open chrome, or any of your phone apps. Then, instead of having to peck around on your phone, you can type on a real keyboard, and move the cursor with a real mouse.
Plus, you can still use your phone independently (I took the picture above with my phone still plugged into the usb-c hub cable).
It is still a little buggy, and there are still a few quirks to work around. For instance …
Unless you have speakers or headphones plugged into your hub, you won’t initially hear any sound. It’s a relatively easy fix though.
You have to go into the phone settings (on your phone)
Click on “Sound and Vibration”
Where it says “Audio will play on”
Choose “This phone”
Once you do this, sound will play from your phone’s speakers. Then if you have Bluetooth headphones that you normally connect to your sound it will switch to the headphones.
The other think that I’ve had to work around is the interaction between the chrome browser, and the apps on my phone.
For some things (Substack, Facebook, Instagram, etc.,) even if you start out in the Chrome browser some actions (like trying to leave a comment) open the app instead of letting you continue in the browser.
I’m sure there’s probably a setting that I can toggle to stop the apps from automatically opening. But for now, my workaround is to right-click and “open in new tab”. This seems to work most of the time.
It really wouldn’t even be a problem if the apps all worked properly on the monitor with the keyboard and mouse. Hopefully something Google will work out in later releases of this feature.
Well, I think that should just about wrap it up, this isn’t a “tech” newsletter after all. But hopefully you might still find it useful.
So will you enable desktop mode and use your phone as portable computer?
Let me know if you do!
Til Next Time,