Google's Pixel 8 series gets USB-C to DisplayPort; desktop mode rumors heat up | Hacker News Reader

Google's Pixel 8 series gets USB-C to DisplayPort; desktop mode rumors heat up

arstechnica.com

42 pointsTomte36 comments

Better late than never. I think OnePlus and Samsung had this feature since like 2018 or so.

And before anyone says it's a pointless feature that nobody will ever use, this feature saved my bacon when my new laptop suddenly died and I had some urgent work to do. I just plugged in my OnePlus to the same USB-C dock cable my now dead laptop used, and hey presto, I got a 4k display output with multi tasking and tiling window support, charging, keyboard and mouse support and a desktop-like experience to do my work. And it was full 4K@60Hz, not some gimped low-res output for showing a photo slideshow.

It's not exactly a proper Linux/Windows desktop UI despite the keyboard and mouse support, but more of an desktop iPadOS style UI with large touch targets, but in case of emergency it's better than nothing if you don't have a backup laptop. I heard Samsung's DEX is even better.

I actually had no idea my 2019 OnePlus even had this feature but I discovered it by accident in a meeting at work when I was low on juice and I plugged in my phone to the USB-C dock cable on the meeting room table and immediately the screen of my phone got projected to the TV and it just blew my mind (and everyone else's in the meeting).

They should really market this feature better. To me it's a pretty big selling point VS iPhones. Being able to turn your phone into a desktop PC with the same cheapo USB-C dock your laptop uses can come in very handy, yet almost nobody knows about it despite many Android users already having it on their phones.

If all you're doing is normal word processing / browser things, this basically sounds like a good enough daily driver.

Add in a fold, and some folks could probably live with a single device across all use-cases, and it'd simply be better because of not needed to sync files.

It might not be good, but not because the idea is bad.

Windows Phone has this feature long time ago and I got to experience it at conference they had. Yea, if your daily workflow is Email/Word Processing/Basic Spreadsheets, it could mostly do what you need it to do but was touch laggy due to hardware. At this point, with most Pro devices, it could 100% be your daily driver. Seems all that is missing is software support. I wish iPhone would do it but Apple clearly doesn't want to cut into iPad/Mac sales.

You can do way more than that. Android can run web servers on-device; I can code and edit my PHP website on an Apache/Nginx/Lighttpd local server, and push changes to production server. All without opening Termux.

If you have Termux, you can do even more, like run a VM for a sandbox dev environment. No cloud required.

Android in desktop mode is far more useful and less locked down than Chromebook. As usual, Samsung has led the way in making yet another Android feature viable, as Google tries to catch up 7 years later.

> Android in desktop mode is far more useful and less locked down than Chromebook

My chromebook (framework) has 64gb of ram and 2tb NVME and thunderbolt 4. It also runs containers, vms, vms inside vms, windows vms, macOS vms, AND Android apps from the play store.

Only thing missing is PCI passthrough from thunderbolt enclosure

At 64GB RAM, what you have is a specialist laptop where most of the work is happening inside of a shell environment.

I tried running Android apps on a Chromebook. Even something as simple note taking (Obsidian/Logseq) didn't work properly because it could not save a text file into local storage. That was over a year ago, so I don't know if things have changed.

>If all you're doing is normal word processing / browser things, this basically sounds like a good enough daily driver.

On 2019 era phones probably not, but on recent flagships with >8GB of RAM and latest Qualcomm SoCs, and UI desktop enhancements like Samsung's DEX, definitely. Except nobody knows about it.

Motorola had it in 2011 in the Droid Bionic:

https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/motorola-droid-bionics-webt... https://thomcraver.com/android/24-hours-with-droid-bionic-an...

This feature is also a lifesaver when your phone screen breaks! A mishap on the bus led to this happening with my old OnePlus phone, and with a USB C to HDMI adapter I was able to navigate around and salvage anything I needed from that device. I actually assumed this was the standard, so when the same thing eventually happened to the Pixel 6 Pro I got after that, I was distraught to learn that Pixels didn't support video-out at all. I ended up managing to get TalkBack (Android's audio assistance tool for the visually impaired) turned on, use that plus screenshots I referenced online to get USB debugging enabled and authorize my computer, and then use scrcpy [0] to control my phone over an ADB connection.

[0] https://github.com/Genymobile/scrcpy

>Pixel 6 Pro I got after that, I was distraught to learn that Pixels didn't support video-out at all

Since Google switched from Qualcomm to Samsung SoCs starting from the Pixel 6, they lost a lot of performance and cool features compared to previous Qualcom driven Pixels.

As much as I hate Qualcomm for being an evil foss hating patent troll, their SoCs were a cut above the competition on all fronts, and phones with their SoCs performed and aged better. Hence why phones with their SoCs were more sought after than the same models with Samsung SoCs.

Shame Google had to ditch them. I heard starting from pixel 10 they'll roll out their own SoCs based on their own design fabbed at TSMC.

That has absolutely nothing to do with the SoC.

Qualcomm powered Nexus and Pixels never had a video output.

And the flagship Exynos line always supported the feature.

>That has absolutely nothing to do with the SoC.

It does, without it you don't get video output. You need the soc to have DisplayPort lanes and a phy to the USB-C port.

>Qualcomm powered Nexus and Pixels never had a video output.

No phones in that generation had video output.

>And the flagship Exynos line always supported the feature.

Google's Tensor is not a flagship Exynos, but more of a budget cut down "Walmart" version of it, made specifically only for Google.

> It does, without it you don't get video output. You need the soc to have DisplayPort lanes and a phy to the USB-C port.

Of course, you need hardware support. Which has been present since 2017. Yet Google never bothered enabling the feature, so this has nothing to do with the SoC, it's just a choice.

> No phones in that generation had video output.

What? There are literally dozens of counterexamples.

The Essential Phone 1 had video output, not the Pixel 2. Same SoC: Qualcomm Snapdragon 835.

> Google's Tensor is not a flagship Exynos, but more of a budget cut down "Walmart" version of it, made specifically only for Google.

Cheap or not, Tensor Gx are still direct variations of the Exynos 2x00 line, which have video output.

When my Pixel 6 Pro screen died, I could still hear the haptic feedback from button presses. So I plugged in a USB C to HDMI adapter, and I couldn't believe I couldn't see it on the screen! I needed to get access to my Google Authenticator (I had not saved the backup codes). That resulted in months of recovering accounts by taking my picture holding up handwritten signs and my ID. Of course I should have saved the backup codes, but it would have been really nice to have an alternate way to see my screen when my phone was otherwise still working.

My trusty old 2017 Galaxy S8 had this feature.

Of course only thing it did was to repeat what's on the main screen but nevertheless it was there.

Also useful for AR/video glasses.

I was so surprised this did not work when I plugged in my ugreen usb-c hub into my GrapheneOS powered Pixel 4a. Keyboard works, but no display. On my iPhone 8 this already worked years ago...

My intention was to use this feature together with a WireGuard VPN connection as well as (x)RDP / ConnectBot to connect to my debian homelab development vm. This way I could have had a perfectly working dev environment during vacation, as long as the internet connection is fast enough.

I also thought about running rootless Kali Nethunter[1] for some pentesting tasks on an external monitor and keyboard.

Although I run GrapheneOS, I doubt that this will ever land for the Pixel 4a :-/

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GmfM8VCAu-I

> Better late than never. I think OnePlus and Samsung had this feature since like 2019 or so.

The 2017 Essential Phone 1 had the feature. So did many 2017 or 2018 flagships from Samsung, LG, HTC, Huawei, Sony, Asus.

Google is petty sometimes. Earlier they killed Miracast for Chromecast exclusively, even if virtually all SoCs for the past 10+ years support it.

>Google is petty sometimes.

Google has no idea how to develop and support a product, period. If that product or feature isn't bringing in billions in ad revenue, then it doesn't matter to them.

  Exhibit A: Pixel getting shittier by the year
  Exhibit B: Android wearables
  Exhibit C: Android tablets
  Exhibit D: Nest thermostats
  Exhibit E: Google Home products not being able to properly work with each other despite being on the same WLAN and made by the same company
  Exhibit F,G,H,I,J,K,ELEMENOPE

The weirdest one to me is the introduction of the IR temperature sensor on the Pixel 8 Pro, without the possibility to read skin temperature, which was added months later, this year. Just WHY?! It would have been cool to have during peak Covid infectious season, but not 2-4 years after, when nobody* gives a shit anymore about Covid.

I swear, product dev at Google is being run by one of those wind-up circus monkey toys playing the cymbals that Homer Simpson has in his head[1], and all engineers at Google just roll with it without question while Sundar is busy pumping the stock talking about AI. I'm waiting for them to introduces a Pixel with a temperature probe you'll have to stick up your *ss and it reads what you had for lunch and recommends you new restaurants on Google Maps.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rC7Y04k5Tbo

> I plugged in my phone to the USB-C dock cable on the meeting room table

This was allowed? I don't think I have ever worked somewhere where plugging company devices to anything other than other company hardware was allowed, for security purposes.

Took them way too long.

I recently replaced my broken phone with the S24 Ultra with DeX as one of the main uses-cases. I've read and watched a fair amount on whether it can be a daily driver, unfortunately most of the content was basically made just to create content, and it was geared towards content creators.

I'm planning to test this out over the next few weeks. Can I have it replace my personal laptop? After much research prior to buying, it seems there's a good chance this should be possible with the likes of Termux and Termux-X11.

If everyone has any thoughts or experience around this, I'd love to hear it.

To replace the laptop, get a lapdock, aka a laptop shell with screen, battery and KB/mouse, and connect that to your phone. The use cases that are officially advertised are always with a stationary monitor in an office. Lapdocks are amazing and bridge the gap perfectly.

I've had a Node.js setup on my old Samsung phone, but never invested in a DeX because a USB hub with a mouse and keyboard worked well enough.

Unfortunately it's all too locked down to have a serious development setup and I had more success just SSHing into a more powerful machine.

It would be great if it turns out to be a better experience than iPadOs, even with a pro.

I've just given up my iPad pro due to it being so limited (no good terminal options, dev tools, filesystem access).

Such great potential from a HW perspective, gimped by lack of features, a 2nd hand cheap 13" touch ultrabook with linux or windows is so much better as an out and about troubleshooting and occasional dev tool.

The Chromebook team has been doing saint's work by building virtualization layers, to let a user run their own apps or OS & have it seem like sound card, GPU, all sorts of stuff including video decoder & encoder (as recently blogged at https://www.collabora.com/news-and-blog/blog/2024/06/06/a-ro... ) seem to just work, even though it's all going through deeply sandboxed containers running their own virtual hardware. It's incredibly ambitious mastery of the broadest technical ecosystem possible, and it rocks, is just awesome. (Alas I don't think anyone else has any idea how to reuse it, which sucks.)

It's a pity the Android team has such incredibly low ambitions here. Mirroring the screen? That's it? All these years latter & that's what you've got? If they were delivering a well baked decent desktop screen like DeX can, I could be more sympathetic, but it just looks like the whole NIH display subsystem & tech stack of Android is a terrible boat anchor, is constantly working against them & keeping them from getting anywhere at a reasonable speed. There's already an OK-ish tablet experience, but this boutique tech stack Android built for itself can't even begin to handle multiple displays or multiple modalities. Or the team just has a low bar for themselves here, is starting really low.

After it blew up, Google swore the ChromeOS on Android demonwas just that, a demo, not going to make it further. But if Android is going to keep setting the bar so low for it's ambitions, if everything will be so minimalist, maybe they should go the ChromeOS route & enable options. https://www.androidauthority.com/chrome-os-running-on-pixel-...

Ideally Android should start trying to bring in best-of-breed standard infrastructure & stop DIY'ing their stack, should give up on SurfaceFlinger & start porting their stuff to respextable technology which won't encumber themselves, won't require constant effort just to keep the basics going, which will work well with others. ChromeOS has not just virtualized but has offloaded their NIH efforts & integrated in good pieces of the FreeDesktop world; this low-ambition non-delivery/partial delivery by Android feels like a strong sign that they are suffering & ought reevaluate whether they really need to recreate the entire stack on their own.

This could get me to switch from Apple. I do not need my computer affixed permanently to a display. Let me have one computer/storage/network device in my pocket and buy screens separately to use depending on context.

I loved the idea of the phone as the portable compute that could be expanded to act like a desktop that Motorola showed back in the mid 2010s. I forget the name of the actual phone though, it had pogo pins on the side/back and a keyboard + screen combo you could dock it to to get a laptop adjacent experience.

The Motorola Atrix. When docked into a specialized laptop it would load up a full featured, albeit slow, Linux desktop. It was wild stuff at the time (and still isn't quite fully replicated even though we have N times more powerful hardware).

That looks like the one. I get why it's not really been replicated. Making a UI function well in both touch and keyboard and mouse modes is hard, the extra space you need for touch is wasted in laptop mode and then you're asking every app maker to support another UI mode which gets into the chicken and egg problem of support. It's not every useful without apps and it's not worth supporting for app makers unless there's a broad userbase or extremely low support costs. The closest we get now is the iPad pro line going in and out of a keyboard case but that's not quite the same and the jump in capabilities is pretty small because the form factors are so close.

This does look useful, but I wonder - would there be any overlap between this desktop mode and ChromeOS or completely separate? I fear if they're totally separate, having two "desktop" modes will result in one of them ending up in the infamous graveyard.

IIRC (I've never used ChromeOS, so this is from readings)

ChromeOS allows users to run Android apps, so the apps could theoretically be shared between both environments.

Of course I feel it's much more likely for Google to kill one (or both) of them off before they can hit their stride.

They were actually testing out running ChromeOS on Android, but apparently it was just a tech demo

https://www.androidauthority.com/chrome-os-on-android-proof-...

I was astounded when I plugged a USB-C hub and a USB mouse into my Pixel phone and it just worked. Would love to have the same happen with a display. Would be absolutely radical if it worked with external touchscreens.

This works on a Chromecast

Comes down to what "desktop mode" means. If its just a big screen with some tweaks then not much use.

...if it gets near chromebook experience then could be interesting

This is a must for AR/VR glasses. I thought that all android devices had this capability. Was disappointed to find out otherwise. I had to use a laptop to use the glasses on a plane.

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