Wow, I feel like I’ve been browsing all wrong, or at least missing out on a lot. I don’t even really miss the adblock extension when I’m browsing on Android. I had one for feedly, I think, but it’s an app on android, so I don’t need it in the browser. I tried a few of those “read it later” extensions like Pocket back in the day, but never really got into it. As long as my bookmarks and passwords sync, I’m happy. And honestly, I don’t even really use my bookmarks on Android much. I either have an app for it if I’m using it as a tablet, or on Dex/Edge I can get there by typing it into the url bar and letting my history autocomplete it, or just using google to get me to the right url.
GReader still works with feedly, and I like the old style layout way more then that feedly app.
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That reminds me - I visited The Guardian a week or so ago to rad a Ukraine update, and it wanted me to whitelist it from AdBlocker - and I noticed AdBlocker had blocked 46 ads just since I landed on the front page!
Vivaldi has adblocking on by default, both on desktop and mobile. The Guardian only has that bright yellow subscription plee occasionally (on an unrelated note, that I’d subscribe to if it actually offered anything of value).
Not that I can blame them. They don’t tend to go in for the usual clickbait etc. that draws people in, so they need revenue from somewhere and their trust can’t pull all that weight.
All Vivaldi Android really needs now is extension support. A lot is solved by them thenselves (adblocking, tab management, translation), but they are never going to include some more niche extension functionalities. It wouldn’t fix some of the native Android UI screen estate inefficiency in desktop mode, but that’s a lost cause.
All that said, I wish we still had Opera with the old dev team (many now at Vivaldi) and Presto. Chromium has become too much of a behemoth.
First major test of something I’ve only ever done from windows: I bought new PDF curriculum and wanted to put it in OneNote. This worked fine from mobile OneNote for the student books; I could insert each one as a printout in each kid’s notebook. But I ran into problems with the teacher guide. I usually keep my teacher guides in Google Books as it provides the most seamless experience no matter what tablet I happen to grab. However, Google Books has a 100MB file limit and the Guide is 117MB. It wouldn’t even import directly from Google Drive. OneNote also would not insert a file over 100MB. Noteability, which is preinstalled on the S7+ handled it just fine, but that means I have to use the S7+. So now I’m on a quest for a new PDF solution for me.
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And now I’ve run into something I absolutely can’t do and had to grab a windows machine to do: Share a onenote notebook. This is the first time I’m going to rope our youngest in with a digital curriculum. I had been printing things for him and asked him if he’d like this one printed, but he wants to do it on a tablet like his brothers. I figured I’d let him try. But I had never gotten around to sharing the Onenote notebook I have of his stuff since I’d always been printing it. Couldn’t find a way to do it from the android app. I may have been able to do it from Onenote in a broswer, but I just wanted to get it done, so I did what I knew worked. It still took a few tries to get the sharing email to send.
One a side note, the PDF shrinking website recommended in the other thread worked from edge on android to shrink the teacher guide so it could be uploaded to google books, so all my teacher guides still live in the same place.
I can select pages and copy them out to individual lesson in the android app, it’s just a bit clunkier as it forces the page full screen rather than keeping the navigation panels open when you want to work in a page.
I think it’s time for me to play around with classroom notebooks and see if I can take advantage of those tools.
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@violajack this is all great and useful info. I keep getting tempted to do more with Dex on my S22 Ultra. Thanks and good luck with your continued efforts !
Point to Dex. I got another unit study for the kids that I needed to build into OneNote notebooks. Yes, I’m as bad about being distracted by shiny new unit studies as I am shiny new tablets. I’d been playing with my little GalaxyBook 10.6 this morning, so I plopped on the keyboard to build the notebooks thinking it’d be smooth sailing in Windows. No go. OneNote for Windows 10 crashed trying to insert the larger PDFs as printouts. So I went back to my desktop Dex set up and plugged in the Fold. Built out two week’s worth of lessons for each kid. Now this could just prove that newer Android hardware is superior to older windows hardware, but still, one got the job done and one didn’t.
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Samsung should get you onboard as an influencer 
What you’ve posted is both informative and helpful and It has made me use dex more often on my 22 Ultra
Thanks, on behalf of the more casual/neophyte DEX users here
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Don’t mind me, I’ve meaning to get a pun out of my system. We should have called this thread
“Let’s talk about Dex baby”
There, now it can be stuck in your head whenever you see this thread.
Given all the talk of increasing MS/Samsung collaboration, MS should pony up and license DeX for the Duo 2 and Neo (YES - NEO) and call it a day on the mobile front.
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If the Duo had a functional desktop mode, I’d have one of those instead of the Fold. It will project it’s screen over USBC but that’s basically worthless vs a a full windowing desktop environment.
Unfortunately, I’m afraid Samsung thinks of DeX as a marketing feature, and not an Android standard, so it will take some of Panos’ cash and perusasiveness - perhaps also a video of his daughters using it…
Allegedly Google has insisted that Samsung implement it as a switch on/switch off feature or they couldn’t qualify it as a “made for google” device and thus have the google apps and the play store.
Bet that will go as well as Alphabet’s threat over the Galaxy Store. It’ll be there; buried incredibly deep.
And tonight, a point against Dex. The zoom app on Android is far inferior to the Windows app. I can’t even get it to log in with my google credentials. I wanted to have the zoom app open on the tablet screen so I could directly look at the camera when I look at people, but also have Dex going on a screen mounted above the tablet for reference. Surprise! Kindle won’t open in Dex. So if I had wanted my book open, I’d have to grab the phone, or attempt to relauch zoom on the Dex screen without losing the meeting, or open kindle over top of the meeting. This was not a meeting I wanted to mess around in. I didn’t really need to reference the book, so it wasn’t a super big deal, but still, frustrating.
That’s one of the biggest issues I had with DeX. With Windows, a display is just a display. You can put whatever you want on it.
The app that got me was my password manager. It would only open on my phone display, and then when filling boxes on the second monitor, guess what would happen? Yes, the onscreen keyboard would pop up, not only covering the password app, but sometimes causing it to lock again.
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FWIW The Zoom app is bad on all platforms IMHO though it does work best on Windows PCs. It’s even worse on Chromebooks.
And the Kindle issue you mention has similar issues on IOS where it’s basically full screen or no screen.
On the sort of bright side, thanks to the Android Subsystem on Win 11 you can have the Kindle App or even the other ereader apps if you side load them in reasonably functional, resizable, moveable windows.
BTW: Part of the issue with Android version of the Kindle app is that it’s built on Android 7 era frameworks for compatibility with their Fire Tablets which run on a weirdly forked, highly customized version of Android.
One last tip. If you have a tablet device larger than 10-11 inch such as the Tab S7 + or iPad Pro 12.9 you can use Kindle Cloud reader which then gives you your ebook in a browser window which allows the normal operations of a browser window.
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I didn’t even think of using the cloud reader on the android tablet, but that makes sense. I use the android app on my pro x. The line really is blurring if I have to use the cloud reader on Android and the android app on windows.
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And this is why I buy books, and then raise the black sails to get myself a useable copy.
The lessons were suppsoed to be learnt from the music industries crash with the Internet, but obviously not.