Samsung’s 2014 developer conference was a deluge of news about what the hardware giant is working on. We now see a more complete picture of Samsung’s VR and smart home ambitions, but the company remained mostly silent on smartphones except for a new feature called Flow.
The concept is basically torn from Apple’s Yosemite playbook, specifically “Continuity”, that family of inter-device features that includes Handoff and lets you take calls on your Mac. So far, it looks like Samsung will be pushing its Continuity clone a little bit further in some places but not nearly enough in others.
Samsung breaks Flow down into three categories: Transfer, Defer and Notify. Transfer lets you read, work and move calls among different Samsung devices seamlessly. Defer lets you hold off on whatever you’re working on until later (also on another device if you wish), and Notify makes any Flow-enabled television, PC, tablet or smartwatch a display notifications and text messages, so you can keep track of your social life even when you’re knee-deep in that shameful day-long movie marathon.
At this point, Flow is all talk, so we don’t know much about how it works IRL. It’s also unclear how this will work with PCs since Samsung’s own hardware offerings are limited to high-end laptops and Chromebooks. So in the end this could be a godsend for the poor person with the world’s largest Samsung gadget collection, but not much good for anyone else. Right now it looks like another example of a Samsung-imposed walled garden, enticing you to buy Samsung for all your technology needs. But, hey, if it can help even two of your gadgets talk to each other, that’s better than nothing.