it's quite common to see a laptopconnected up to a monitor and wireless keyboard andmouse and being used like a desktop computer and instead of using one of these what if we use one of these can it be used like a desktop computer?
Android TV pc, lets find out... first we're going to need a cable to connect the phone up to the monitor, i've got here a mhl cable with and hdmi port in one end, a micro usb port
to charge the phone while it is being used.if you don't have a bluetooth mouse and keyboard, you can getsomething like this which has an hdmi port it also has the port there for charging, aswell as a usb port there so you can connect up a usb powered mouse and keyboard. lets go ahead and connect this up once i've got it connected up thereare a couple other things i'll need to do in order to prepare it for use like adesktop computer obviously a desktop computer has a mouseand keyboard so we'll need to go ahead connect those up the home screen and the app draw are shown ina portrait orientation
some phones have an option to flip thisinto landscape but on this one we don't so what we will need to do to get rid ofthose horrible black bars either side is to install a launcher from the googleplay store there is a huge range to choose from but notall of them support a landscape orientation for the homescreen and app draw so you may need toexperiment, but the one i'm going to use is called next 3d launcher. so here it is i've now got it installed and as you can see it istaking up the full real estate of the monitor
the next thing we need to do is get rid of the on screen keyboard as we are using an external one we don't need is takingup valuable screen real estate in order to do this we just need todownload an app called 'null keyboard'. once we've got it installed just go into the settings and in set this as the default keyboard now that everything's set up we're pretty much ready to go. so here i've fired up google chrome and i'm surfing the internet just like i would on a desktop computer
so the experience is very similar you can even watch embedded youtubevideo clips and speaking of youtube, the youtube app also works quite nicely on the set up before we go any further i shouldprobably mention what the mouse controls do in android so by scrolling up and down you canscroll up and down on web pages or menus or what ever you happen tohave open a left click is the same as touching on the screen so it will activate what ever you click on
a right click is the same as the back button on your android phone so by clicking the right button i'll take you back to the previous menu then on the centre button or your mousescroll wheel if you do a long press on that it will bring up the task manager so you can select the apps that you have open at the time a single click on the same centrebutton will take you back to the home screen. so what about if you want to actually do some productivity on your smartphone
i'm going to show you this application called 'polaris office 5', now this application is compatible with microsoftoffice so not only can you view word, excel and powerpoint files you can also create and modify them. so lets first go into the word processor now with this i'd actually hate to have to use this on a daily basis it's not very intuitive... it's not verysmooth... and it's not what you experience on a desktop computer but in a pinch you could use it to get by.one of the problems is that all the menus are designed for a smaller screen so
on a large external monitor everythinglooks kind of massive and kind of chunky and the page itself in order to get enough on you have to zoom right out and then you get these horrible greybars either side. i wish we could actually fit two or three pages on the screen at one time when it's inthis sort of desktop environment. there certainly are a lot of options he can play around with but if you are used to microsoft office you may find this a little frustrating. it does take a little bit of time
to learn to use this but we have toremember this is running on a phone so in that respect it is pretty powerful. next we'll have a look at the powerpoint equivalent, and this one here i actually think works quite well on this sort of setup, it's quite intuitive an easy to use and navigate and then lastly is the spreadsheet. nowon the phone if we zoom right out the text here gets so tiny thatyou can't actually read it off the phone's screen but on the larger screenit's quite
usable so it's quite good that we canget so much data on the screen at one time now keeping in mind that this is running of a phone, itis a pretty powerful package but if you are used to spreadsheets likemicrosoft excel you may find this little bit difficultto get used to. if you are serious about productivity another option is you can look atinstalling a desktop operating system on your you phone so that you can run full desktopapplications in this example here i'm running linux
with a full version of libreoffice, so it is a full desktop application but i'll be covering that in another videogoing over the pros and cons of this but for the moment we're only looking at android and android-native apps now some phones like this galaxy phone and some lg phones and even some sony phones they have an option where you can run multiple applications on thescreen at one time so we'll have a look at the multi-windowmode on this samsung device and see how it works now for media consumption this works quite nicely, you can watch
a video clip on one side and maybe read the internet on the other side so it works fine for media consumption but what about productivity? maybe you wantto do a cut and paste from one application to another, well it'snot quite as easy as it would be on a desktop computer you can't simply just cut and then go tothe other application and paste it does take a bit of working around and it's a little bit frustrating andnot very intuitive something else you might do on a normal desktop is scanning and printing
well you can do that on a phone as well. so i'm going to scan the cover of a notebook and once it has been scanned in we can then do other things with it, so we can print it out or we can open it up in an image editor and modify the image itself something else that's quite typicalon a desktop computer is gaming while mobile phones are getting morepowerful and the graphics are also getting quite impressive, so it is something that canbe achieved as well
if you enjoy this video, i will be doinganother video where i will be looking at running a desktop operating system on the smartphone and running full desktop applications as well so if you wanna check that out be sure to stay tuned
