![]() It is only this year that really powerful apps like Flow and iBrowse have become available, easy, feature-rich, smooth and convenient.What is this Samsung Flow? It is, in a nutshell, of a service that allows one device to communicate with another. WebDev, for example, is an old Android app that lets Windows “see” your smartphone as an external hard disk, through Wifi. Most were practically useless and would bring you more headache than convenience. ![]() There have been software applications to connect smartphones and computers for many years. Hence the importance of applications like Samsung’s Flow or Apple’s iBrowse. But the tiny screen of a smartwatch is even smaller than that of the phone itself! In the end nothing beats the convenience that comes with a computer’s keyboard, mouse and large screen. Part of the concept chain is the smartwatch that more and more people are going for these days. The concept is not new, and it helps the various devices complete each other in terms of practicality. Wireless networking, whether through Wifi or Bluetooth (over shorter ranges, admittedly), is making all devices talk to each other and communicate effortlessly. If yours is not an Android device but an iPhone, then you would go for iBrowse, which is a simple app that “lets your Mac or PC access an iOS device”. Samsung likes to call it a “magical experience of seamlessly connected devices”. I have been using Flow for just a few days and now cannot imagine working without it anymore, if I am at my desk. You can also share contents and synchronise notifications. You can make calls, answer calls, open files, search contacts, rearrange icons, compose SMS or WhatsApp messages, check email, and so forth. Once displayed, you can do virtually everything your phone does, but without touching it at all. You actually “see” your smartphone’s screen(s) on the larger screen of your Windows or Mac computer - again wirelessly. The new application is available if your phone runs on Android, and there are two versions of it, one for Windows computers and another for Mac machines. There is of course much more about the concept than merely accessing files. Functionality, however, is somewhat limited, as it is restricted to accessing the files stored on the phone. It connects wirelessly to the smartphone, and once this is done you drive it from the computer. Integrated in the latest update of Microsoft Windows 10 is a built-in application called Your Phone that just lets you do that. Slowly but surely, software applications that address this need in a smarter way are appearing in the IT market. This is cumbersome, limited, tedious, and - again - old. The old, “dummy” way consisted of connecting the phone to the computer via a USB cable and then access the media and other files. Not to mention the full-size physical keyboard and of course the mouse. Although these would be stored on the phone, being able to watch and eventually post-process them from the comfort of a computer’s large screen is invaluable. The most obvious application is viewing media contents like photos and videos. Hence, in this last case, the need to have both connected. But doing it while at the same working at our computer is not a negligible part either. After all they are essentially mobile devices designed for that. Operating smartphones while on the move represents a significant part of using them.
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