Samsung and Microsoft make Android and Windows better friends - The UpStream

Samsung and Microsoft make Android and Windows better friends

posted Friday Aug 9, 2019 by Scott Ertz

Samsung and Microsoft make Android and Windows better friends

This week, Samsung finally announced the highly leaked Note 10 smartphones, the newest member of the popular phablet line. While the Note 10 brings many new enhancements, the biggest news (for us) was the enhanced relationship between Samsung and Microsoft. For years the two have worked together, with Microsoft edition Galaxy phones being made available with Microsoft apps pre-installed. Now, the two have come together even closer to bring some expanded capabilities between the phones and Windows 10.

The Your Phone app on Windows 10 is nice, it can bring notifications, text messages, and even photos from your Android device to your desktop or laptop with ease. Now, starting with the Note 10, you'll be able to do a host of exciting new capabilities. For example, Your Phone will interact with Samsung's DeX, bringing screen mirroring directly to the app. This means no more third party software or questionable downloads, it will be built right into your devices. This also means that DeX will be front and center, allowing you to use the desktop features of the phone on an existing PC. It also means that Android apps will be easily accessible on your Windows 10 PC, allowing for Snapchat on the PC for the first time (officially).

This is just the beginning, though. In a future update later in the year (likely in conjunction with the semi-annual Windows 10 update), Microsoft plans to bring phone calling to the application. This would allow you to use Your Phone to make and receive calls from your phone on your computer, eliminating the need to have the phone easily accessible.

This is all part of Microsoft's cross-platform access campaign, which seems intended to counter Apple's closed-loop ecosystem. iPhone owners can do many of these things now, but only if they have a Mac. With Mac being a statistically insignificant portion of the computer world, this means that the majority of iPhone users are left in the dark. Apple has always followed the old Sony methodology, hoping that restricting capabilities will drive sales, despite that philosophy almost bankrupting Sony, and hasn't worked for Apple, either. The open nature of Android and the modern Microsoft seems to be driving growth (just look at iPhone sales numbers).

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