Android’s Desktop Mode gets a huge upgrade with Circle to Search

Circle to Search is one of the best tools available on Android phones. It lets you quickly search for any text or picture you see on your screen using Google. For example, it can translate words, figure out what song is playing, help you with a game, or even point out possible warnings about potential scams.

When this useful feature first came out, Google added it to almost all top Android phones. However, there was a catch: the feature only worked on the phone’s main screen.

If you connected your phone to a separate computer monitor, turning on what is called Desktop Mode, the search tool would simply stop working. Luckily, Google fixed this problem in the newest Android update.

The recent Android 16 QPR2 update now fully allows you to use Circle to Search on bigger, external displays. Before this change, the tool was strictly limited to your phone’s screen. We checked this ourselves and can confirm the change is real.

A Pixel phone using the older QPR1 update could only use the tool on the phone itself, but a Pixel phone with the new QPR2 update can start the search on both the phone and the connected monitor.

To start the search while in Desktop Mode, all you need to do is click and hold the app drawer button (which is sometimes called the Action Key) or the Home button using your mouse. Once the feature is active, you can tap, draw a circle, or scribble on whatever part of the screen you want to look up.

The search results and answers will pop up in a box on the opposite side of your monitor. Right below what you searched, you will see standard options like creating content, saving the image, choosing text, or sharing what you found.

So far, we have not found any other big changes to Android’s Desktop Mode within this QPR2 update, apart from the excellent new ability to use Circle to Search.