I spent a few days with Motorola’s Ready For desktop mode — it’s not ready for anything

I spent a few days with Motorola'due south Ready For desktop mode — it'south not ready for anything

(Paradigm credit: Tom's Guide)

Motorola Gear up For, a productivity feature introduced past Motorola before this twelvemonth, is like a well-looked after antique typewriter. It works, in spite of a few quirks, but it really doesn't have a identify in the modern globe.

Prepare For is Motorola'due south attempt at the delicious prospect of being able able to ditch your PC or laptop and work exclusively from a smartphone. Phones these days practise non lack the power needed to run the apps most people crave to do their job, just having an interface that works both on a phone and on a larger display is a much trickier hurdle.

We've seen attempts at this before, near notably Samsung's DeX, which continues appearing on Samsung's flagship devices but with little widespread acclamation. Motorola has adult its ain desktop organization in Ready For, and I had a chance to try it out.

After my fourth dimension with Set For, I plant it to be a functional improver to already feature-packed phones, merely it doesn't practice enough to justify its presence.

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Motorola Ready For set up-upwardly

To use Ready For, you first need a compatible Motorola phone. Simply three phones currently work with Gear up For: the newly released Moto g100 which I tested the arrangement on, and the Motorola Edge and Motorola Edge Plus, which came out last year.

Once you lot have your Motorola telephone, it's simple plenty to get Set For started, as all you lot demand is a USB-C to USB-C cable or a USB-C to HDMI cable to plug the phone into your brandish. The HDMI cable Motorola includes with the Moto g100's Ready For kit is particularly well-suited for the job since it also features a USB-C port to plug a charger into, pregnant you don't have to pick between using Ready For and powering your phone.

Aside from the cable, in that location'due south also the $59.99 Ready For Dock. You lot don't demand to utilise this, only it comes with its own benefits. Information technology provides a sturdy way to concur the telephone and features a congenital-in fan to go on things absurd and running smoothly.

The main dock is magnetically fastened to the stand up portion then you tin easily position the phone vertically or horizontally. You can even attach the phone to a different stand by using the spiral fitting.

What happens once you get going depends if you accept Bluetooth accessories or non. If you don't ain whatever, the Motorola handset becomes your input device, acting as either a trackpad or a keyboard depending on what you're doing. This works fine — in some cases, it'southward amend than using other peripherals since all features are fully supported.

If you do have Bluetooth peripherals, then the Motorola phone is costless to be used as normal. That seems to exist the more optimal manner of doing things if your'eastward working for longer periods of time.

Comport in mind that despite what Motorola says, this isn't a dual-screen feel in the traditional sense. It'southward more like having a i-plus-one-screen, since there'south no existent interaction betwixt the desktop and the g100's home screen. Instead, they carry like ii dissever devices you tin merchandise windows between on the wing.

You can utilize 2 screens in 1 nonetheless by opening the telephone within the desktop, either vertically or horizontally. This allows you to employ your mouse and keyboard to navigate, input text into the phone, or motility files and information effectually more easily.

Motorola Set For interface

Once yous're plugged in, you'll detect yourself with iv options to pick from when using Gear up For. Your main pick is the Fix For desktop, which looks a whole lot similar Windows x, downward to the "start" button in the bottom left corner with notifications, date and other icons on the right. The default gear up-up for windows is to have them appear as pocket-size pages you lot tin easily shuffle between on a single display, much like macOS.

While the packaging may wait like a PC interface, Android eleven still behaves similar y'all'd await. There's your notification window with quick settings, the lock screen looks like a big version of the one on the phone, and the "start" bill of fare is basically an app drawer.

At that place are some unique options to have advantage of in Set For. The most interesting one is the Subject field Tracking camera, which you lot tin can operate from the desktop when the camera is open. Similar to the Centre Stage feature Apple includes with the new iPad Pro 2021, it's certainly fun to have your face e'er in frame while on a video call. That alone gives you a practiced reason to plug in the telephone beyond the desktop interface.

The Television set, Game and Video Chat modes in Ready For take y'all to full-screen menus featuring any apps you have downloaded that match those categories. Information technology's a handy shortcut to playing stuff like Asphalt ix on a big screen, which is quite a thrill if you've been constrained to a phone-sized play area upwardly until at present.

Motorola Ready For: Asphalt 9 — (Image credit: Tom's Guide)

Motorola Ready For user experience

As I worked through the Set up For desktop over the course of a solar day, my optimism with Motorola's characteristic turned into frustration, and I longed to return to the comfort of my MacBook. It's not that Ready For is completely unusable, it's worse than that: Ready For is near usable.

Some of this can't be helped. Since you lot're running expanded versions of mobile apps, you don't go quite the same functionality you lot'd find in true desktop versions. For instance, Google Chrome on Android doesn't back up extensions. That means unless you take an Android app version of a given extension, you can't apply information technology on Ready For, which complicates your typical workflow. (My work at Tom'south Guide makes utilize of a lot of unique extensions, so this was peculiarly troublesome for me.)

At that place are also lots of weird little inconsistencies, like how some apps can exist scrolled with your mouse, and others tin't. Some apps resize themselves to the desktop'southward larger landscape windows without any problem, simply others need a lot of fiddling around in the options, or simply can't empathize they're no longer jump past a pocket-size phone screen.

All of these issues experience like they'd be elementary fixes, but I take to wonder which app development teams are going to invest time into making their apps work on one brand's desktop mode rather than focusing on keeping the rest of the app updated.

What I can't error however is the operation of Gear up For. The Snapdragon 870 chip and 8GB RAM on the Moto G100 ran multiple app windows without a hiccup, just I imagine if you wanted to apply the phone at its maximum potential, yous'll want to opt for the 12GB RAM version instead. This extra memory space may also help keep the fan in the stand quiet.

When starting Gear up For, the fan doesn't spin, but once the telephone warms upwards, the fan automatically switches on and won't shut off until you've stopped using the productivity tool. Information technology's at least effective, since holding the phone afterwards revealed it had stayed cool, but the fan itself is noticeably college pitched than a typical laptop or PC fan. As a result, information technology's a lot more irritating when you lot're trying to work.

Motorola Ready For verdict

Having tried Set For, I think information technology's an effective fashion to do some light work on your phone more comfortably. Set up For gives you unproblematic way to improve your gaming, movie and video call experiences from a uniform phone.

But I'm still not sure who truly benefits from the Ready For system. Given y'all need a monitor to make Ready For function, and ownership a portable 1 is a huge expense, the platonic scenario for regular Ready For utilize therefore seems to exist hot-desking in an office or visiting another location where you don't have computer access. You can plough upwardly to work with only your phone and a cablevision or 2, then plug into a monitor that's already there. If you're lucky, you might even have some keyboards and mice provided, although for quick tasks the virtual trackpad/keyboard works well enough.

Simply thinking about these scenarios exposes how Set up For feels congenital for a unlike world than the one nosotros live in now. With so many people having had to work from abode for the past 12 months, there's less of a demand for something designed to be more portable than a pocket-sized laptop. Plus with video calls becoming more and more than the norm even before the global lockdowns, it means the use cases for Set up For are at their most marginal in years.

If you're convinced by what Ready For offers for work, the primary piece of advice I can give is that you need your most important apps to be available every bit Android versions. This gives you the best chance of adapting your existing workflow to Ready For, although it'south still non perfect since not all apps interpret one-to-one from PC or Mac to Android.

Set up For has more of a purpose as an entertainment and leisure tool. With direct lines to your games and video, Ready For lets you aggrandize the fun to however large your display is. Simply you can do the same affair with a Google Chromecast or Amazon Fire Telly Stick, and not be forced into buying i of 3 specific phones. Again, Ready For feels like a technology that's debuted half a decade or more too late.

The cost might be tempting to some, simply it would be a false economic system. Certain, the Moto g100 starts at £450, and the dock and cable are included in the box. It sounds like a great deal for a phone and a work laptop in i, just that sum doesn't account for the monitor or TV you need to make the system piece of work, nor doesn't guarantee yous'll exist able to work finer from just Android apps.

If yous're on a limited upkeep, you're likely better off picking a cheaper telephone, including some first-class ones from Motorola similar the Moto g Power or the Moto g10, and so spending the difference on a cheap laptop or Chromebook. This way you're not tied to needing a monitor with accessible ports, and have the greater practicality of PC apps.

We'll accept a total review of the Moto g100 ready very soon. But for the meantime, know that Ready For isn't much of a reason to run out and buy this particular phone right now. Ready For has a few slap-up tricks, and since it comes free with the g100 it's not an unwelcome gift. I just can't understand why Motorola thought at present was a expert time to debut a technology that other companies have been failing to make work for years already.

Richard is a Tom's Guide staff writer based in London, covering news, reviews and how-tos for phones, gaming, sound and whatever else people need advice on. Following on from his MA in Magazine Journalism at the University of Sheffield, he'southward also written for WIRED U.Yard., The Annals and Creative Bloq. When non at work, he's likely thinking about how to brew the perfect loving cup of specialty coffee.