Samsung Galaxy S21 now supports DeX wirelessly on PCs
Last year, Samsung said that its Galaxy Note 20 will have wireless support for DeX with the arrival of One UI 2.5. That was of course good news for those who wanted to use a bigger screen to work with their mobile phone. Unfortunately, though, it has only worked with several TVs and monitors and not really PCs. Now it looks like they’re rolling out support for DeX on computers with One UI 3.1. But it looks like it will only work with the Galaxy S21 for now.
The folks at Android Police shared that they are now able to wirelessly connect their Galaxy S21 device to their PC through the DeX client. But there are still a few caveats but hopefully, Samsung is working on that as well. For one, if you’re using the Link to Windows app on your computer, you’ll have to switch that off if you want to use DeX. After updating to the latest version, you’ll need to tap the DeX shortcut on your phone and then choose DeX on the PC.
The DeX experience on your PC is limited to 1080p in wireless mode and seems to be better than your TV connection. There’s still a minimal input delay but it’s not as bad as the lag on the TV. It’s good enough for opening files or viewing a presentation but if you’re planning on watching a video or playing a game, you might want to try some other connection as the latency may frustrate you.
The other caveat is that S Pen support doesn’t seem be working as expected. When you open Samsung Notes and go to the drawing mode, you’ll have to use the mouse on your PC as the S Pen won’t work. This is sad because the Galaxy S21 is the first in the flagship S series that supports the S Pen which was previously the domain of the Note series. Hopefully that can be remedied in future One UI updates as it would be nice to see your S Pen sketching away on your PC screen.
The wireless DeX support on the PC seems to be available only for the Galaxy S21. No news for now if it will also be available for other devices that will get the One UI 3.1 update as well.
