New Galaxy Tab S9 FE tablets suffer from an odd DeX downgrade

This year, Samsung's betting more than ever on its Fan Edition lineup. A new FE smartphone was a given, but the company went ahead and announced its first-ever pair of FE-branded wireless earbuds, and not one, but two new Fan Edition tablets.

In some regards, these FE tablets aim to punch above their weight. However, throughout using a pre-release Galaxy Tab S9 FE+ unit for a week before Samsung's official announcement, we found that the Tab S9 FE tablets are oddly lacking in one area, namely Samsung DeX.

To our surprise, neither the Galaxy Tab S9 FE nor the Tab S9 FE+ supports DeX on external monitors and TVs. The only way to use DeX on these new Fan Edition tablets is on-device. What gives?

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An inexplicable USB-C downgrade might be the culprit, but doesn't explain everything

After some digging, we realized that the two new FE tablets have USB-C 2.0 rather than USB-C 3.2, which means DisplayPort (DP) capabilities are missing. Correction (via @chrisprice): You can have DP over USB-C 2.0 with Alternate Mode, and it is possible for devices with USB-C 3.2 to lack DP. For whatever reason, Alt-Mode on the Galaxy Tab S9 FE is either missing or it's disabled.

This should explain why the Galaxy Tab S9 FE series can't run DeX externally, but it doesn't explain why Wireless DeX is also missing.

Given that the old Galaxy Tab S7 FE has USB-C 3.2 with DP and supports DeX on a monitor/TV — not to mention that the Galaxy S23 FE can also run DeX — the Galaxy Tab S9 FE range feels oddly inconsistent in this regard.

Whatever Samsung's reasons might be, at the end of the day, your only option is to use DeX on the Galaxy Tab S9 FE and S9 FE+ is to run the desktop environment directly on the tablet and attach a keyboard cover or a mouse and keyboard through a dongle. It's possible the retail units will support wireless DeX and DeX on TVs and monitors, and we will let you know if that ends up being the case.