A technology that can change the way we interact with our devices

Our phones are powerful computers but with one limitation… the screen.

Last Monday Apple introduced iOS 8 and Mac OSX Yosemite. To be honest I wasn’t expecting anything “revolutionary” or “magical”. But, to my surprise Apple introduced something that I thought it has a lot of potential.

They called it Continuity.

It’s pretty much a “connection” between two devices and it allows for one device to use features of another. For example, if you are working on your Mac and you get a call on your iPhone, you can answer it from your Mac. Or, if you are editing a spreadsheet on your Mac, the moment you grab your iPad, you will be able to resume your work immediately.

This sounds great, right? Well, it can be even better!

We all carry around our phones and these devices are usually quite powerful. You can play HD games at 60fps, watch movies, edit photos, create music etc. They are powerful computers but with one limitation… the screen size.

Small screens immediately limit the way you interact with the phone. Typing is slow, you usually can only do one thing at a time and that is usually content consumption. Our phones unfortunately aren’t the devices where we are going to write a blog post, write a long email, or post-process our RAW files.

And that’s too bad, because they can handle it if it wasn’t for the small screen.

Last year and after watching a lot of sci-fi movies with my girlfriend (we wanted to get some inspiration for a project of hers, and yes ‘Her’ was one of these movies) I thought of one way that we could use our phones to their full potential.

So, here it goes…

Imagine you are commuting and you are using your iPhone or your Nexus 5 to read the latest tech news while listening to your favourite music. You might share an article, save another. The phone is the ideal device for that use case.

But the moment you get to the office, you will leave it on your desk and open your laptop.

Well, what if, the moment you leave your phone next to your monitor, the monitor immediately becomes the interface of your phone. The phone is now a CPU with an HDD and some extra capabilities like WiFi, LTE, Camera, Phone, SMS, GPS, Accelerometer, Compass etc.

But we don’t stop there. If that monitor has a much better camera, why not jump on a Skype call and use the LTE/WiFi connection from the phone and the microphone and camera from the monitor. The sharing of features can be bi-directional.

Still with me? Let’s see some real life use cases.

Scenario 1: Wearables

My pair of “smart” glasses would always be connected to my phone and provide me with a UI that is made specifically for glasses. This means that my glasses are just a very thin client where most of the capabilities and features come from the phone.

That can work with most wearable devices. I would be able to get notifications, maybe see a map of where I am, or even answer the phone.

Google is also doing something similar with Android Wearables where your wearable device is paired with your phone.

Scenario 2: Gaming

You downloaded the latest game from Square Enix but playing it on the phone is not the best experience. So, the moment you leave your phone next to a monitor, the monitor immediately shows the game’s UI. The phone can turn into game controls by providing a different UI or if you have a gamepad, that can also be connected to your phone and you can use that for playing.

Scenario 3: Biking

You want to go for a bike ride. So, you mount your “smart” bike and then automagically the bike can show in it’s display a small map with your speed. It would be able to check for accidents along your route, inform you of scenic routes and also show you images of points of interest, pulled from the internet. All that information would be fetched from the phone and displayed in the bikes UI.

Scenario 4: Calling, texting

So far, all the previous scenarios described different ways that we would extend the capabilities of our phones. But the phone would be able to extend the capabilities of other devices, like computers. So if you got a call while working on your laptop, you would be able to get a notification and answer from your laptop. Same with texts. All the data would be funnelled through your phone. This is what Apple demonstrated at WWDC 2014.

Scenario 5: Flying

Wouldn’t be great if you didn’t have to have your laptop on your lap for 8 hours while flying? What if, instead of the in-flight entertainment system each sit would have a nice monitor that could connect with your phone and extend its capabilities.

You would be able to surf the web, watch movies that you have on your phones, or from Netflix (if you have a good WiFi connection) and if you had one of these “smart” keyboard you could also do some light work.

I’m sure that there are plenty more use cases and if such technology existed we would be surprised by the ideas that people would come up with.

I am positive that this type of technology would be more beneficial and useful than, let’s say, curved displays. Or maybe that technology is crap and there is another, better way to improve our future interactions with technology. I would prefer that companies would focus more on that kind of research than on how to do curved displays.

It would also make me very happy if this technology would be adopted by all major tech giants so that devices from different vendors would be compatible with each other.

We are not there yet, but one can only hope!

P.S. If you can think of any other use case for this technology, please leave a comment.