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I have a Samsung Galaxy Tab 3 Lite tablet which even after rooting has not much of use. I then decided to do some funky stuff with it and share my experience here. In this post, I demonstrate how to turn Samsung Galaxy Tab 3 Lite to monitor.
Introduction
When I rooted my Samsung Galaxy Tab 3 Lite, I was hoping I could make some use of it. No surprise, I couldn’t do much about it because the Android version is too old (4.2.2). I then decided to look for some custom ROM and again that led to nothing. Most of the ROM hackers have moved on and the old ROMs are not maintained anymore which are worse than stock ROM. I also don’t have much of knowledge and time to create a ROM or learn how to do that. Hence, the tablet stayed dormant again.
Once I saw not much of practical use in my Samsung Galaxy Tab 3 Lite, I decided to do some experimenting with it and see how far it goes. Worse comes worst, the tablet will break which at this point does not matter much.
So the first experiment was to turn the table to a second monitor which turned out to be great.
Turn Samsung Galaxy Tab 3 Lite to monitor with spacedesk application
I started to search for available approaches to turn my table to the secondary monitor. Most of the stuff I found was designed for either a newer Android version, or are paid applications, or are a gimmick and not working. I was a little bit frustrated until I stumbled upon a video by Novaspirit Tech in which he explains how to use a phone as a second monitor using spacedesk application. You can watch his video below,
After watching the video I decided to give a shout and try to test the application on my Galaxy Tab 3 Lite to see whether it works or not. To my surprise, it worked perfectly and here I explain how to set it up even though it’s relatively easy.
The first thing you need is to install spacedesk desktop application. The application is completely free and unlimited. Keep in mind currently, it only supports Windows. Once you have downloaded the desktop app and installed it, make sure the spacedesk server is running. It should create a small icon near the clock.
After that bring your lovely Samsung Galaxy Tab 3 Lite and install the spacedesk app from Google Play, here.
Then all you need to do is to run the application on the tablet and within a few seconds, you should be able to see the second monitor is showing.
Here I’d like to note a couple of things:
- Keep in mind your tablet and your laptop should be in the same network, otherwise, it won’t work
- Windows detects the tablet as a real second monitor, hence you can mirror, extend the display or anything else that you can do with a monitor
- The reaction time is not very great but it’s usable absolutely
- Quality is okayish since compressed images are transferred not video
- If you touch your tablet screen, the mouse cursor will move, pretty amazing!
- If you change the tablet orientation the display will adjust itself, so you can have a vertical display which is good for reading.
Verdict
Spacedesk is an absolute phenomenon application. I was pretty amazed by that and I’m looking forward to testing the stable release. Even if you have a device that is not Android, or Windows, or iOS but has a modern (HTML 5 supported) browser, you can use Spacedesk on it. Above all it’s completely free. I highly recommend it.
The only downside as of now is the lack of support of the server application for Linux and macOS. That’s also understandable, they have to write a driver for each OS to emulate the monitor behavior. And that’s not easy of course.
I hope you enjoy this post. If you are interested in Galaxy Tab 3 Lite posts have a look at the following link,
https://geekyhacker.com/?s=galaxy
