Hacker News Reader

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.

> 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

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...

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.

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.

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.

>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.

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

> 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.

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.