Imagine Apple’s Continuity feature, but on steroids. Now you have a sense of what Continuum is for Microsoft, which the company talked about during its BUILD developer conference.
In the demo, Microsoft had PowerPoint open on the phone, and when connected to a monitor, the monitor displayed a larger tablet version of PowerPoint. When opening the Outlook app, the full version for the PC opens up instead. Interestingly, you can still use the phone display at the same time, essentially letting you multitask. Because of this, Microsoft said that “any screen can be your PC.”
Related: Check out all our Microsoft BUILD 2015 coverage
The Continuum demo was shown off for phones. Phones will be able to play nice with HDMI monitors, as well as Bluetooth keyboards and mice. Unfortunately, the feature will only be supported on newer hardware, so anyone who currently has a Windows Phone won’t be able to take advantage of Continuum.
While discussing the new feature, Microsoft acknowledged that a lot of people use their phones as their primary computing interface, and also hinted that it will show off new phone hardware using Continuum, since today’s demo used emulation on current hardware.
Continuum will launch when Windows 10 launches, though, as previously mentioned, you will need new hardware to take advantage of it.
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