Samsung

Samsung

Samsung

Samsung

Samsung

Samsung

Samsung

Ron Amadeo.

Update: Samsung's listing for the Dex dock has gone live; it will cost $150 and ships in "late April." Additional pictures also show that in addition to its USB and HDMI ports, it actually has a wired Ethernet jack as well, an interesting feature given that phones are innately wireless.

Original story: Samsung brought a few different accessories to the launch party for the Galaxy S8 this morning. One, Samsung Dex, is the latest in a long line of products that promise to let you replace your desktop computer with your phone.

Samsung hasn't announced pricing or a release date, and most of what we know comes from Samsung's presentation. The dock is small and circular, includes two USB ports and an HDMI port, and it is powered via USB-C (same as the S8 itself). The Verge reports that there's a small cooling fan inside the dock that presumably keeps the phone from throttling too much, enabling more desktop-y performance.

The desktop UI looks mostly straightforward: there's a lock screen, a desktop, and a Windows or Chrome OS-esque taskbar with app icons on it. You can use apps full-screen or keep them in windows—we're still talking about Android apps, and not all of them are well-suited to running on anything other than a phone or a small, narrow window.

Dex is one of several products that is blurring the lines between phones and desktops. Remix OS is an Android distribution that you can install directly on regular PCs, Google has experimented with its own windowed multitasking mode in some Android N betas, and supporting Android apps in Chrome OS accomplishes much the same thing. And while Microsoft's Windows Phone is effectively dead, using a Windows 10 handset with a compatible dock can similarly expand a phone UI and apps to simulate a desktop experience. And way back in the day, the also-doomed Ubuntu Phone also used the promise of desktop convergence to differentiate it from then-mobile-only operating systems like iOS and Android.

Listing image by Samsung