Android 15 is now available for Pixel devices. In addition to a myriad of changes and new features, we’ve also made updates to the taskbar that transform Android tablets in ways that have been desperately needed for a long time. This means you can now pin the taskbar just like you would on a desktop OS, and you can now easily create and pin app pairs to increase your productivity.
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These changes will first be visible on the Google Pixel 9 Pro Fold, but will soon roll out to many other Android foldable phones and tablets. Of course, just because it’s finally part of Android doesn’t mean these features won’t be available on other devices on the market, such as foldable devices like the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 6 or tablets like the Honor MagicPad 2. Not.
In fact, the Honor MagicPad 2 is the very device I’m writing this article on, and it’s been my go-to productivity device for the past two-plus weeks since Hurricane Helen devastated my hometown. This, along with the Honor Magic V3, was a combination of devices I didn’t know I needed until I had no power, no home internet connection, and no serious way to work from home.
This combo is made possible by what the company calls the Honor Magic Ring, which enables instant screen, connectivity, and control sharing between Honor devices in a way that’s completely clutch during these difficult times.
unexpected combination
If you were like me, you were working from home, but you didn’t have an internet connection or power at home, and the entire town didn’t have running water, so cafes and other places with reliable internet weren’t open either. Let’s say. That’s exactly the scenario I encountered over the past two weeks, and it left me with an interesting problem to solve. It’s about how to continue working.
At first, I thought I’d just tether my Honor MagicPad 2 using my phone’s hotspot and operate it as usual. The problem is that I have an older T-Mobile plan with a limit on hotspot data and there is no way to increase this limit without changing the plan. I’ve been on this cheap plan for over 10 years and this isn’t going to change that, so that option is gone.
So I decided to dig a little deeper into the Honor Magic Ring, a technology that pairs Honor devices in a way that others would envy. With two swipes and two quick taps, the Honor Magic V3’s large foldable display is mirrored onto your tablet, allowing you to run it in split screen alongside Honor’s Notes app on your tablet. I was also able to stream music from my phone to the Honor MagicPad 2’s incredible speakers, faithfully recreating the feeling of working in a (now dark) basement office.
Honor MagicPad 2 lets you easily create and save app pairs, so you can easily launch a mirrored workspace with notes on one side of the screen and your phone screen on the other. I was able to do that. Once I set this up I was golden. I wrote on a comfortable large tablet display and uploaded to Google Drive and Android Central CMS using a mirrored smartphone display.
Because I was using my phone without tethering off my data connection, I was able to use my unlimited phone data plan as if it were running natively on my tablet. At some point, I accidentally found a way to take it a step further by changing my mirrored phone screen to a full-screen tablet display on a tablet.
What’s improved in Android 15
I really enjoy how deeply connected Honor is with their products, but a few small changes take things to the next level. Android 15’s new pinable taskbar completes the “laptop experience.” This means a dedicated taskbar at the bottom that you can use to quickly launch and switch between running apps.
Some tablets like the OnePlus Pad 2 allow you to temporarily pin the taskbar, but with Android 15 you can now permanently pin it like you can on a laptop. I fully expect this feature to also make it to all Android tablets that receive the Android 15 update.
Next, we hope to see even more content sharing across devices. Honor released the revamped Magic OS 8 interface on the Honor Magic 6 series in early 2024. This includes a new side-mounted shared UI. However, there is no easy way to drag and drop content between devices using a split-screen window. Copying and pasting text between devices works very well, but moving images and other media is still more unwieldy than I thought, using Quick Share or Honor Share instead of just dragging and dropping between windows. and have to move.
Finally, Honor’s Magic OS doesn’t allow you to force all apps into split-screen view. This doesn’t make much sense to me. This is because you can float any app and adjust the aspect ratio freely. So I’m not sure what the holdup is here.
What I ultimately derived from this forced experiment was that tablets are ready to replace laptops for many tasks, even if they’re a little harder to use. This allows me to do most of my work with much better battery life than my laptop.
Now, if Adobe could install the full Creative Cloud suite on Android, or at least the essentials like a full version of Photoshop, I could ditch my Windows or Mac laptop for good. Masu.
