Not quite Continuum, not quite DeX! (Surface Duo 2 with NexDock)

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(Originally published by me on AAM, I'm including it here for wider interest and in case the All About servers go down.)

Many have bemoaned the death of Continuum circa 2016, with Samsung's DeX taking up a lot of the slack, albeit in the Android world. And then we have the Microsoft Surface Duo pair of devices, ostensibly without a desktop interface but I hope to prove in the video below that the very nature of USB 3.1 (here over Type C), along with a landscape-first device like the Duo and a capable standard lapdock, means that 90% of the functionality you'd expect from a 'desktop' interface is in fact taken care of automatically.

See what you think. The video is captured zoomed in a little, for framing reasons, plus it's almost impossible to get everything in focus all the time at such close range, so do forgive production quality - you'll easily get the gist:

Watching this back a year later, it occurs to me that I didn't demo all the things you can plug into the NexDock, so for example giving the Duo 2 access to USB sticks and SD cards, plus (perhaps redundantly) a mouse or other pointing device.

In the real world, despite my enthusiasm in the video, I haven't felt the need to take along the NexDock 360 on a trip - I have several Bluetooth keyboards, which are far lighter and smaller, and these fulfil the need to enter lots of text on the go, while the Duo 2's unfolded 8.something" tablet mode is a large enough screen to see what I'm doing.

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