You’ll arrive home or at the office, connect your smartphone to the dock and work or play. No laptop or PC. Your computer will be your mobile phone. This was the promise of rapprochement.

We’ve been talking about this for over a decade, and it’s a topic that particularly fascinates me. Motorola, Canonical or Microsoft tried but none succeeded.

Later would come projects that showed us what the future could be like: Huawei with its desktop mode, Motorola with Ready For and, above all, Samsung DeX, finally offering the mobile phone as an alternative to a portable mini PC for moving from one place to another.

Both maintained these convergence options on their terminals but for some time the function in question seems to have lost its relevance to integers. There’s almost no news, they don’t promote it – they don’t usually mention it at events where they launch their flagships – and its popularity seems very low.

Meanwhile, Google has missed this opportunity many times. Although he seemed to hint at interest in this option from time to time, he later left us in a difficult situation. Until now.

It seems so, according to the latest news on the development versions of Android 14 that will lead to Android 15. The last of these is Android 14 QPR3 Beta 2.1 (Quarterly Platform Release 3) It is possible to enable several options to access desktop mode.

To ensure that this option is enabled when a terminal with this operating system is connected, the mobile phone must have support for video output from the USB-C port. They did this, for example, on Android Authority or on the ETA Prime YouTube channel – they tried it with the Pixel 8 Pro – and the result is very interesting.

Of course, it allows you to easily work with several, especially since windows opened on that desktop can be resized. Android doesn’t offer a default launcher In this experience, however, it is possible to install applications such as “Taskbar” that provide exactly this taskbar so that the interface is more similar to our computers with Windows, macOS or Linux.

Android Authority makes it clear that there are significant limitations: Outside of the launcher, there are no keyboard shortcuts to simplify managing windows, and drag-and-drop support doesn’t work in most cases.

Still, the fact that this option is available and that Google has enabled video output on the Pixel 8/Pro is promising news for the future of this feature. Something that once encouraged manufacturers to create interesting accessories to take advantage of this and turn our mobile phones into laptops.

Actually, Could be one of the heroes of Android 15 and the future Pixel 9 Theoretically, it is expected to arrive next autumn. And if this feature is, as it seems, part of this operating system, it will be something that will turn almost any Android mobile phone (with video output support, we insist) into a mini PC that can be used anywhere.

There are undoubtedly still many issues to be resolved, but Google may have finally decided to enable one of the options that will undoubtedly make a difference on the iPhone. Unless Apple is thinking the same thing, it’s something that doesn’t look like they’ve done it before.

in Xataka | Welcome, convergence: finally your smartphone is also your PC