Topic: Accessories
Samsung’s DeX dock for the Galaxy S8 costs $150 and will ship in April – The Verge (Mar 30, 2017)
I actually excluded this DeX solution from my various comments on the Samsung announcements yesterday, not deliberately, but probably because it seemed like the least important thing Samsung announced and I simply forgot about it. These solutions have been around for years, and they’ve never done well, only in part because they’re clunky but mostly because the compelling use cases are pretty hard to find. Anyone who regularly travels almost certainly has a laptop they could plug into a similar setup (or use independently), while anyone who doesn’t would be unlikely to justify the investment in not just this $150 dock but also several hundred dollars’ worth of monitor, keyboard, and mouse too for occasional use. I did spend this morning with Samsung’s enterprise team and saw some impressive demos of virtual Windows desktops from Citrix and VMware running on this solution, and those are slightly more compelling than the Android hybrid this thing runs by default as a desktop experience, but the caveats all still apply. This still feels like a very niche solution which very few people are actually going to find useful.
via The Verge
Apple plans new smaller Ultra Accessory Connector (UAC) for Made-for-iPhone accessories – 9to5Mac (Feb 6, 2017)
This is one of those reports where we have the alleged what, but not the official why. The last big example of this was the pervasive rumors of the demise of the 3.5mm headphone jack before the iPhone 7 launched. The rumors turned out to be accurate, but none of them came with an explanation, which meant that for months we had screeds about Apple’s anti-consumer stance without any kind of input or defense from Apple, which hadn’t even announced a change yet. With that in mind, though it’s tempting to complain about yet another new connector technology from Apple (on top of USB-C in MacBooks and Lightning in almost everything else), we don’t know yet exactly what it will be used for. At some point this year, Apple will no doubt give us an explanation, and we’ll have to decide whether it’s a sign of courage, user-hostile, or something in-between. (For what it’s worth, I was pretty positive on Apple’s headphone jack transition.)
via 9to5Mac