Greatest crossover of all time: Microsoft and Samsung preview Android apps on Windows via Your Phone app
- Reference: 1596716110
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/08/06/microsoft_previews_android_apps_on_windows/
- Source link:
Famously, Redmond has [1]canned Windows Phone , but it still wants a presence in mobile, and Android is its best chance, given that it has a more open ecosystem than Apple's iOS. The company has its own Android device set to launch later this year, the [2]Surface Duo , but also has a partnership with Samsung to integrate Galaxy smartphones and tablets with Microsoft 365 and Windows 10.
Samsung's Link to Windows, combined with Microsoft's Your Phone application, already lets users mirror a phone to the desktop OS so you can operate it with keyboard and mouse. There is also cross-device copy and paste. At yesterday's virtual [3]Unpacked event, the two companies announced the app-streaming extension to this integration, which gives a look and feel of running the apps on Windows as opposed to controlling the phone remotely.
[4]
Users will be able to use the forthcoming Galaxy Tab as a second screen for Windows 10
One potential snag: audio from the apps will play back on the phone, not on the PC. However, there is a handy extra capability. Users can run multiple Android applications in separate windows, as demonstrated at the event by Microsoft communications manager Phillip McClure, though this capability "will roll out later in the year", according to the [5]detailed description . Android apps can also be pinned to the Windows taskbar. This is on top of the usual Your Phone capabilities (which work with any Android device): access to photos, messages, notifications and calls.
Another integration feature, briefly shown at Unpacked, is the ability to use the forthcoming Galaxy Tab S7 as a second screen for a Windows 10 PC.
Clue's in the name: Samsung's next Galaxy Note line captures scrawls with responsive stylus then punts them over to a PC [6]READ MORE
Microsoft 365 users will be able to synchronise Samsung Notes with OneNote, and Samsung Reminders with Microsoft To-Do. Outlook Mobile will run on Samsung Galaxy watches.
On the gaming side, the two companies also said that Samsung Galaxy will support streaming Xbox games with Microsoft's Xbox Game Pass Ultimate – a subscription to Microsoft's gaming platform. Game streaming is not exclusive to Samsung: a couple of days ago, Microsoft [7]said that this feature, in beta from 15 September, will work across all Android devices running Android 6.0 or higher, Bluetooth 4.0, and with a mobile Wi-Fi or data connection of 10Mbps download speed or higher.
[8]
Microsoft showed multiple Android apps running in separate windows, though still phone-shaped
Some of the new features recall Microsoft's efforts with [9]Continuum , still the subject of a [10]pretty website despite the abandonment of Windows Phone. Continuum exploited the Universal Windows App concept, in which apps running on the phone would scale nicely to run on a large PC display. Continuum gave users the option of using the smartphone as a primary computing device, while still taking advantage of keyboard, mouse and full-size screens.
Integration with Android still falls short of that concept, though for users whose documents and data are cloud-hosted, the idea of a primary computing device should no longer matter.
Partnership with Samsung is all very well, but owners of other Android brands will not want to miss out on major features. It seems unlikely that Microsoft's own Surface Duo, for example, will fall short of Samsung in this respect, even though the current list of [11]supported devices for Link to Windows is, for now, exclusively Samsung. ®
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[1] https://www.theregister.com/2019/01/18/windows_10_mobile_death/
[2] https://www.theregister.com/2019/10/02/microsoft_surface_phone/
[3] https://www.samsung.com/global/galaxy/events/unpacked/
[4] https://regmedia.co.uk/2020/08/06/secondscreen.jpg
[5] https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2020/08/05/announcing-windows-10-insider-preview-build-20185/
[6] https://www.theregister.com/2020/08/05/samsung_note20_launch/
[7] https://news.xbox.com/en-us/2020/08/04/xbox-game-pass-ultimate-cloud-gaming-on-september-15/
[8] https://regmedia.co.uk/2020/08/06/multipleapps.jpg
[9] https://www.theregister.com/2016/08/19/continuum_game_changer_or_novelty/
[10] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/Continuum
[11] https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4551890/supported-devices-for-your-phone-experiences
[12] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Me too, really miss having the WinPho live tiles for email and calendar, particularly loved the ability to have a tile for each mail account.
I'm still rocking on 8.1, on a Lumia 820...
Coat, 'cos this is a tech site and the above hardly counts anymore!
Also still using my Lumia 1020 and Windows Phone 8.1 - never got to try out Continuum :-(
I'm still using my Lumia 640 with Windows Mobile 10 for some apps over wifi, even though I use an IPhone 11 as my primary phone and the Lumia no longer has a sim card. I got 5 years of support for the Lumia, versus 1+ for my Samsung Galaxy, and some of the apps just run better on the Lumia than the same app on the IPhone. Even some of the Apple apps drive me crazy on the IPhone - the phone is fast but the apps are really flakey. However, with telemedicine becoming standard, and no Windows mobile telemedicine apps from my physicians, the move to the IPhone was a no brainer. The support issue totally turned me off to Android.
It was very impressive, but after the first 'play', I don't think I ever used it. Recently threw out the free dock that MS supplied. Shame they didn't give it one last push - it was a good product, spoilt by the way they failed to support older phones.
Continuum had been abandoned?
>> pretty website despite the abandonment
Hmmm... guess I missed that detail.
Seems like just yesterday I was reading about Continuum and thinking it was "almost there".
Which meant I could foresee it being the compelling reason for finally moving on from my old "clamshell" to a "smart" phone.
Guess it will still be a while before I'm tempted again.. if ever.
Second screen is new??
"briefly shown at Unpacked, is the ability to use the forthcoming Galaxy Tab S7 as a second screen for a Windows 10 PC."
Funny that - I'm currently doing exactly that, using spaceDesk, on a Sony tablet (Xperia Z4 and have used it on my Z5C phone too).
Its a bit slow over wi-fi, but perfectly usable when USB-Tethered.
Hate it when large manufacturers try to sell something already around as 'theirs' or 'new'.
Do not like
So you have Windows, and want access to lots of Android specific apps, now can you by hanging a Galaxy device off it. Or you could run them natively on the device you just bought and skip the screen, and skip all the complexity of the connections.... I wonder how that will pan out!
The core things with the Tab S7+, are :
a) Good: finally a bigger screen!
b) Good: top spec processor (except it will probably come with Samsungs own baked processor outside the USA)
c) Bad: Dumb ass pen placement hanging off the back, like, who thinks that that's a 'convenient' place to put a stylus? Hidden round the back so you cannot lie the tablet flat.
d) Bad: Keyboard now has a trackpad, because despite having a touch screen and a stylus, somehow you want a terrible way to manipulate a mouse cursor which has limited use in Android because Android doesn't treat mouse clicks as touches for apps that don't specifically support mice????
e) Bad: Trackpad on case means the screen is further away from the eye, negating the advantage of the bigger screen.
f) Bad: Multiwindow still requires set up. I expect to have icons in the launcher that launch a full layout of multiple apps. I do not expect piss around splitting and rearranging apps each time I want to run more than one. (click icon1), launches {App1, App2, App3, Floating App 4}, click icon2, launches {App1, App5, Floating 6}. I don't want to piss around splitting up the screen each time I want my messaging set to run, or my stock set to run...
g) Bad: Still acts like a phone. Ring ring, and the whole screen turns into a phone. WTF?? It's a tablet, they will use it with a headset, the phone should popup in the corner on speakerphone or headset. When I'm talking to someone I might have a browser or editor open, perhaps a maps, perhaps other apps, the phone app should be the minor of that, staying in the corner.
h) Bad: Can you really not do a better multi-window. One that can support more than the physical screen space? FFS, you could divide the screen up into strips, and if there is more than 3 on the screen edge-skewed some so I can flip over to them like a deck of cards. Drag them down to latch them to the bottom of the screen to keep them full, now that's latched, it stays like a full card, I can flip to others in my queue and latch the ones I'm working with. If you don't like interfaces like that, then something else, BUT SOMETHING OTHER THAN CRAPPY TILES THAT THE USER HAS TO SETUP EACH AND EVERY TIME.
Same old Android problems:
Apps life cycle s second guessed by the OS, it guesses when you're done with an app, or when you want to keep it running. False positives, false negatives. It's still shit.
Keeps forcing apps to be dinky little phone apps. Low memory constraints.
Expects apps to adjust to the screen space available, instead of window size adjusted to apps interface. Hence few useful tablet apps, because this idea does not work.
I expect to be able to run phone apps in vertical strips of a landscape tablet, and landscape tablet apps in zoomed-out or scrolled window on a phone. All apps on all devices, the OS needs to fix them up.
I expect a mouse to behave like a finger touching the screen if the app doesn't support mice. It's the OS's job to sit between the app and the device, not the app to change drastically for every device if it does't want/need to. Google or Samsung need to do some major rethinking here. Years of failure does not mean it needs to fail.
So in essence, I am the target market for this Tab S7+, power users for Android. I currently use lots of tablets and UDP between them to get a decent amount of screen space to work with. It's a big sucky hack, and I don't see anything coming out soon. Also their UDP connection, even over the LAN isn't reliable. Yet its reliable to the PC! That's a bug nobody has fixed because, well, UDP isn't guaranteed right? So why bother fixing it?
Greater than the Magnum P.I., Murder She Wrote crossover?
I think not.
Just a simple syncing of the Sammy Android Calendar to 0365 without 20 steps would be a move forward.
Samsung DeX
Samsung has had Samsung DeX for PC's & Macs, which seems to do the same thing, for quite a while.
https://www.samsung.com/us/explore/dex/
What's the point?
What's the point of accessing your smartphone remotely, unless you were not smart and lost it? Can't Android apps run on the Windows Subsystem for Linux?
Continuum was awesome. I miss my Windows Phone.