Windows Continuum: What happened when I used a Windows 10 phone as my PC - royaldameapardly

I'm sitting at my desk happening a Monday afternoon, ready to smash something. I've spent the ancient four hours nerve-racking to finish a task that normally takes less than half that clip. Simply this isn't a typical day. IT's the first Day in a hebdomad where I vowed to work exclusively in Windows 10 Mobile's desktop Continuum mode via my Lumia 950 instead of on my kosher PC. Good-bye AAA games, traditional desktop applications, and easy multi-tasking. Hello, mobile software and a struggling app ecosystem. Why did I contract for this again?

Because Continuum offers an interesting premise: Instead of toting around a laptop, just plug a phone into an external mouse, keyboard, and ride herd on to switch to a desktop-like experience.

Imagine being able to leave the laptop computer at home, and just grab your phone and few cords. Then, when you're out and or so, scrounge up your peripherals and boom! Instant desktop replacement.

I'm not the only one thinking this way. HP hopes its upcoming Elite x3 smartphone will convince IT departments to distribute the handset with accompanying laptop docks for corporate drones to use while away from the mother ship. Heck, on paper home users could even ditch a separate Personal computer completely and use a Continuum-capable Windows 10 phone as the supreme roving computer.

After spending seven days inside Continuum, however, information technology's clear to me that Microsoft's desktop style on phones just International Relations and Security Network't ready to meet my necessarily.

continuum1 — Windows 10 Mobile's Continuum port and Start screen when connected to an external presentation.

Really? I'm a truck driver?

How practically computing power do I call for to practice my job anyway, I thought. Surely writers and reporters aren't contribution of the specialized, hand truck-drive class of reckoner users, based on the analogy successful famous by the late Apple co-founder Steve Jobs. Each I do is put words in a school tex editor, load them into a website backend, crop an image or two, then paw everything off to my editor. Trustworthy, I've got online explore connected top of that, but what's a few dozen browser tabs?

While a PC—still a Chromebook—can handle my daily needs without a stutter, my Lumia 950 just wasn't up for the task.

The core of the problem might live the software. Continuum is nevertheless in its inchoate years and lacks some key productivity tools. For case, Continuum doesn't subscribe the standard Windows snap modality, which allows you to view two programs simultaneously on a single screen. That means you have to use uncomparable full-screen app at a time. Hello, Metro Week experience from the bleak Windows 8 era.

Actually, that's a short unfair. While the basic construct of using one app at a time remains, Continuum is nothing like Windows 8's Metro fashion. First polish off, there's a complete desktop UI that is immediately more familiar than the Windows 8 Start screen ever was.

continuumwithdesktopnetflix — Netflix in Continuum works easily.

Second gear, even though the app ecosystem is struggling along Windows Ring, it's far better than the Windows Store during the early years of Windows 8. Plus, in Continuum mood Windows 10's Edge browser becomes surprisingly full-featured—so a great deal so that it can run desktop Netflix without a hitch.

The mobile Office apps in Continuum mode likewise turn back into replicas of their background counterparts. They don't bear characteristic parity, of course, but a casual user would live hard-pressed to see the difference of opinion 'tween the two.

Many other Microsoft apps do work fantastically well in Continuum, such as Mail and the Photos app. Fractional-party apps are where the problems start. Developers have to rebuild their apps as universal Windows apps and explicitly add Continuum hold—and umpteen harbor't finished that yet.

Spotify for Windows Mobile, for example, fails to work as a Continuum screen background app. The Spotify web app requires Flash, which Edge on transportable doesn't hold. My only solution was to run the flying app connected the phone while using Continuum on the big covert. That let me get my music fix at work, but it wasn't ideal.

Things got even more problematic when I wanted to use Slack's collaboration puppet for communicating with my editors. Slack doesn't accompaniment Continuum either, which substance I had to choose betwixt the web app or the app connected my small-CRT screen phone—not a great choice, because Edge doesn't backup desktop notifications from websites. In the death, I was stuck between getting notifications on my phone and responding to my editor program on the web app. Not a great solution, but it worked.

win phone hand main — Galore popular Windows apps don't confirm Continuum, which meant I spent a lot of time victimization my Lumia 950 as a phone rather than a Personal computer.

On top of all that I also had issues getting into PCWorld's subject matter management system (CMS) using Edge, which affected Maine to turn to my PC. Not unforced to give up so easy, yet, I secondhand Cybele Software's non-slave-to-endeavor Thinfinity Desktop guest to access my PC from my Continuum-enabled phone. It was a little ridiculous using Continuum to backlog into a PC little than a foot away from me, merely Continuum vows must be unbroken.

I also ran into problems when I sought to do some basic image editing. My needs are non extensive: crop a few photos, maybe paste a small ikon onto a larger Stanford White screen backgroun to keep the CMS happy, operating theater cut out any own info from my screenshots.

With meager needs I was determined not to yield for a pic editing suite, which led me to Fhotoroom—a free app that supports Continuum. Only on my Lumia 950, the app slowed to an absolute crawl in Continuum mode. Even a simple cut-and-spread operation took minutes or else of seconds. Perhaps with a punter GPU, Fhotoroom would've through a better job.

continuumcortanapanel — Cortana in Continuum.

Speaking of nontextual matter, gaming left a circumstances to be in demand in Continuum. Two games I institute that nourished Continuum includedCrossy Road and Age of Empires: Castle Siege. Some were diverting, but I'd really hoped to play Lara Croft GO.

I assumed that because Croft is a Universal Windows Platform (UWP) app—or at least information technology appears to embody, with cross-platform buy up and cloud make unnecessary support between Windows 10 PCs and phones—it would play nice with Continuum, but that's not the showcase. In fact, you really have no way to know whether a Windows Store app supports Continuum unless it says so in the developer-supplied description on the Windows Store, or past simple trial and error.

The good stuff

I've spent a lot of time complaining about Continuum, but over clip I grew to appreciate the feature. There's something futuristic about working totally twenty-four hours on your phone, then taking information technology out of the dock to read a script on the redact or snapping a few photos of your kids. Everything you need contained in one gimmick. Magical.

Continuum also supports about of the niceties you're used to on the desktop. Keyboard shortcuts like Windows Key + PrtScrnfor screenshots works, as does Alt + F4 for closing programs. In fact, the latter is often the easiest agency to close a program, because the tralatitious equal button in the niche of a program window disappears (in favour of more screen place) until summoned by a hovering mouse.

wordmobilecontinuum — The universal Office apps shine in Continuum.

A number of peripherals also worked with Continuum. My keyboard, black eye, and headphones had no trouble working. In fact, mouse response proved quite a zippy—I expected the feel for to be laggy. My Xbox 360 control and Microsoft webcam, nevertheless, were both incompatible.

Overall, Continuum was a neat know, but that's truly all information technology was. For forthwith, I am a Jobsian hand truck number one wood despite my meager computing demands, and my little hand-held coupe only butt't meet my of necessity. In fact, I wouldn't recommend Continuum for anyone who needs to use two apps simultaneously.

For simple newspaper-to-digital data incoming on a spreadsheet, firing cancelled netmail, or typing your thoughts into a document, Continuum will work just close. It mightiness even cost an ideal solution.

The minute you need to exercise two Beaver State more productiveness apps at once, notwithstandin, Continuum's cracks start to show. Maybe one twenty-four hour period Continuum will be willing for me, but not yet. In the meantime, I'll suffer to keep lugging that trusty laptop more or less wherever my travels take me.