Continuum for Phone
Continuum for Phone has the opportunity to truly revolutionize more than just mobile computing – it offers a way to utilize productivity applications from your phone in a “desktop” environment. It gives you mouse and keyboard support and scalability. It’s something truly innovative in the world of mobile operating systems – and something that can drastically change how businesses operate on the technical side. While it is unlikely that consumers will be replacing their personal computers with Lumias, businesses could easily scale down the number of dedicated workstations and even thin clients in the office in favor of the highly portable smartphone with continuum.
For decades, businesses have operated with multiple aspects of technology – office workers with dedicated workstations, field workers with laptops, and those in between who need both workstation and laptop. Even with networking, file sharing, and other background wizardry to help things seem like smooth transitions between devices, you still had multiple environments to work with. Different systems with different software, different local files, and often even different system software. Sometimes this would be remedied with dumb terminals and thin clients connecting to a terminal server – so none of the work or data was done locally, but stored and processed at a central location – but even in these instances, employees would often need an array of devices to properly perform their work.
Even with this in place, you’d still encounter staff with multiple methods of connection – a thin client or even dedicated workstation at the office, a laptop for field work or working from home (though a docking station could decrease the number of devices in use), and a phone for on-call duty. There’s a disconnect between devices and platforms within an organization. While a laptop can serve double duty as a workstation and mobile work environment, it can’t really replace your phone. You also have several organizations utilizing tablets that are running iOS and Android while in the field – moving away from Windows based laptops for more portability, but a reliance on apps and what is available on those devices’ stores. So, the devices and applications they have available while in the field greatly differ from the environments they work in while at the office. It’s something that causes problems with consistency – working across different platforms in different programs can be confusing for staff and needlessly difficult for IT professionals to maintain.
When you have a problem with your system, it’s often a problem with your system – something that needs to be addressed locally and on individual devices. IT professionals within the organization have to fix multiple different devices across an array of platforms – which can prove costly as 3 people experiencing issues means 3 different devices to troubleshoot – and possibly 3 entirely different platforms.
Windows 10 and Windows 10 Mobile looks to unify everything. While your phone isn’t going to be an all-round replacement for a dedicated workstation, even with Continuum, it offers portability, scalability, and compatibility. Instead of needing a workstation or thin client to remote into a terminal server, a laptop for home, and a phone for being on-call, those tasks can be consolidated into a single device.
With continuum, you can remote into the terminal server with full mouse and keyboard support – scaled to a proper display. You can take your phone with you to the field and home, dock it, and use productivity apps or access the terminal server from there. This creates unity and helps improve business security – if your device is lost or stolen, nothing is stored locally. If you are working in a terminal server environment, issues become less about fixing your individual environments and technicians can have a greater focus on maintaining and improving existing systems.
Even without a terminal server or similar setup, continuum offers exciting business and home use features. Being able to carry around a device in your pocket with the complete Microsoft Office suite that scales to whatever display you’re using will be huge for remaining productive without being tied down or carrying around a 15-inch slab of hardware. As the Windows marketplace grows with more and more universal apps, this productivity won’t be limited to just Office or other pre-installed software. Sure, developers will need to see the Windows marketplace as a profitable platform before there’s an even greater surge of available software – but with over 110 million Windows 10 devices in use in less than 3 months, I’d say that will come sooner rather than later.
Virtualization and cloud computing is the future. Unified platforms with a consistent experience across all your devices is the future. Windows 10 and continuum for phone is a big step toward that future.