- #ANDROID SWIPE ON USB TOUCHPAD ANDROID#
- #ANDROID SWIPE ON USB TOUCHPAD BLUETOOTH#
- #ANDROID SWIPE ON USB TOUCHPAD WINDOWS#
Clicking and dragging with the mouse can therefore be interpreted as asking the open Android application to do two different things-highlight text, or swipe, and there's no way to tell which one will happen. With touch you usually have to long-press or double-tap on some text, which will highlight a single word, and from there you have a pair of draggable handles which mark the beginning and end of the highlight. Take, for example, highlighting text: with a mouse, clicking and dragging across text will highlight it, and there really isn't a comparable single-step action on a touch screen.
#ANDROID SWIPE ON USB TOUCHPAD WINDOWS#
A few times you'll be asked to replicate a finger swipe with a mouse, like on the lock screen, which means clicking-and-dragging. It's an awkwardness Windows users have had to put up with since Windows 8, and it makes the mouse feel like an afterthought rather than a viable primary input method.īut move beyond "virtual finger" interactions and things get very inconsistent. Most interactions treat the mouse as a "virtual finger." A single left-click maps pretty easily to a screen tap-tapping on an app will launch it and so will clicking on it.
a mouse cursor! A familiar black arrow will pop up the second you connect a mouse. If you're playing along at home, plug in or pair your mouse with an Android device and you'll get. You can highlight a word and right-click for the usual context menu. Microsoft Word, with its desktop heritage, does great. Some OEMs even build Android devices with a keyboard and mouse, like the Asus Transformer series, which is a convertible laptop that runs Android.
#ANDROID SWIPE ON USB TOUCHPAD BLUETOOTH#
Any Android device can pair with a Bluetooth mouse and keyboard, and if you want to go the wired route, just about any phone can plug in a mouse and keyboard via a USB OTG cable and a USB hub. The biggest affordance Android makes for a desktop OS is that it supports a keyboard and mouse. It worked, but Android still has a ways to go before it can be called a real desktop operating system-quite a ways, in some cases.
We've Frankensteined together a little Android desktop setup using a Nexus 9 and a USB keyboard and mouse to see just how easy-or complicated-it was to use what is still formally a "mobile" operating system in a desktop context today, right now, without complicated changes or reconfigurations. Re-architecting Android for a mouse and keyboard is going to require major changes to the smartphone operating system, but Android is actually much farther along that path today than most people realize. And, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal, Google will soon be bringing Android to yet another form factor: desktop and laptop computers. Android is the most popular mobile OS on the planet, and Google has brought the OS to cars, watches, and televisions.