For anyone that doesn’t know, Desktop mode is when you connect a phone to and external monitor via a USB-C to HDMI adapter and are able to mirror the phone onto a bigger screen or, and this is the cool part, use a desktop like environment on that other monitor. Some of the best examples of this is Samsung DeX and Motorola Ready For.
So first of all why would someone want to do this? As phones get more faster and more powerful the barrier between phones and full fledged laptops or computers become more blurred. It’s not an exaggeration to say that phones now can do 90% of activates that people use laptops for. Things like writing a paper, researching, editing, watching movies, and even some gaming can all be done on your phone very easily. But the reason most people aren’t using phones as their primary devices for laptop or computer oriented activities is because the interface is simply not as good as it is on a laptop. In a pinch it can be done but having a bigger screen as well as a keyboard and mouse for editing or writing a paper makes a world of a difference.
A couple of months ago Google pushed out a new desktop mode type environment for their Pixel 8 Pro and Android 15 is improving their desktop mode. It seems like we are finally reaching a point to where companies are remembering and updating this feature that has existed since Android 10. This could potently be a game changer for the phone and portable computer industry.
That’s why developing a desktop mode on future Nothing phones would be such a cool idea. Imagine being a student and only needing one device to do all your work on and using that same device to game or watch on. The reason I say future Nothing phones is because the Nothing Phone (1), (2), and (2a) all have USB 2.0 which, to my knowledge, isn’t capable of sending video out. You would need at least USB 3.0 or 3.1 to be able to use desktop mode.
And who knows maybe Nothing can make a laptop that is basically just a keyboard and monitor for the phone to plug into like some other similar products I have seen. And if they included a battery in it then it could charge the phone and have crazy amount of battery life. It could potentially even rival the the battery life of Apple’s MacBook’s. With the new wave of ARM laptops and the massive progress we’ve seen with the X86 to ARM transition layers, perhaps in the far future we can see X86 programs running on Android phones. If that happens then the will be pretty much nothing stopping us from having an All in One device.
