Intro
While my laptop was being shipped to me I wanted to be as productive as possible using my Samsung Galaxy A35. I was vaguely aware of the availability of Microsoft 365 apps such as Outlook. How far could I take this…?
The recipe
To cut to the chase, I was maybe 60 – 70 % effective. I used equipment found in the typical IT person’s home plus one inexpensive purchase from Walmart.
Here is what I used:
- HDMI monitor
- old Amazon firestick
- cheap bluetooth keyboard purchased from Walmart
- phone stand
And here’s what I really wished I had but did not:
- bluetooth mouse
Which apps worked well:
- Outlook
- Teams, especiallt chat, less so the meetings function
- One Note
- Edge
- VPN client
I must say the bluetooth keyboard worked really well for doing some serious typing up of emails.
How the external monitor worked
So I “came up” (in quotes because I’m sure many others figured out this same thin) with the idea of casting my phone screen onto an external monitor by way of the screen mirroring capacibility available on even the oldest amazon Firestick. On the phone you simply go to Smart View Mirror Screen.
So that prevented me from having to hold the phone at least while I was drafting emails.
But, and it’s a big one, is that the external monitor was not a TV and the sound from meetings was killed by this setup. And I did not see a way to keep audio local to the phone while only casting the screen.
A smaller problem is that the refresh lag is quite noticeable under conditions of rapid screen refresh. So it may take a second or two to show what the phone’s screen shows.
Still, it’s pretty cool.
I would have bought a bluetooth mouse but it simply wasn’t available at my local Walmart. I was pretty inconvenienced without it having to constantly touch the phone screen for various things.
And the external keyboard
Pretty well. Even some shortcuts worked. Alt-TAB, which I use a lot to switch between apps has some kind of vaguely similar effect on the phone, but not to the point where I could rely on it usefully. The unlock shortcut button sort of woke the up the phone screen at least.
TAB helped me to pop from one field in the form to the next the way I would use it on a PC.
Overall responseiveness was satisfactory.
The small form factor was not a detriment, and maybe even an advantage since it’s so light and portable.
What if you have an HP G5 docking station lying around?
Well I do. It has a USB-C cord which you normally plug into your HP laptop. But I didn’t have the power supply for it so I couldn’t use it when I would have needed it. Well, it basically works with a Samsung phone – at least the keyboard and mouse worked. In my 10 second testing the attached HDMI display did not automatically show anything. Maybe there are some phone settings which would need to be changed. I didn’t mess with it at all.
But it’s cool seeing a mouse working. It suddenly paints a mouse pointer on your phone screen which you can move around and click to launch an app.
Apps are often baby implmentations
At first I struggeled with the Outlook app, trying to use it as though it were my full-blown Outlook client on my PC. It only had one week’s worth of messages, which was pretty limiting since I was out for more than a week. Then I had a lightbulb moment and remembered that the Web version of Outlook worked on my phone. So I switched to using Outlook through the Edge browser – much better for me. That’s https://outlook.office.com/ . I could get full history and therefore do more reliable searching through messages.
Responsive Design work-around
Sometimes the mobile app version of a web site just doesn’t have the featuires, but looks nice. Edge has a feature you can choose called View Desktop Site which gives you the “real” web site. Now it may look tiny, forcing you to expand and shrink with two fingers. But at least it will generally work.
Where is Notepad or Notepad++
I didn’t look for an app. I suppose there is one. Somtimes you just want to inspect your clipboard. I settled on pasting into a new draft Outlook email to do my visual inspection of my clipboard.
References and related
I prepared the above solution with one day’s notice. If you had a couple days you might check out the Samsung Dex. I guess it would work for modern Samsung Galaxy phones though I haven’t tried it myself.
The web version of business Outlook, which is a pretty good implementtion of the full-blown client is https://outlook.office.com/