Lenovo Smart Share: Smartphone and notebook in a duet
With Smart Share, smartphones and Windows notebooks can exchange photos with each other in just a few moments. Whether iPhone or Android doesn't matter.
Lenovo Smart Share on a notebook.
(Image: heise online / sht)
Sharing photos between smartphone and PC without having to go to the cloud or fiddle with cables is not always easy. Lenovo is introducing Smart Share, a new function on its Windows notebooks that aims to solve this problem.
To bring smartphone and notebook together, all the phone has to do is knock. Smart Share supports both iPhones and Android devices, but initially only Lenovo's x86 notebooks of the new "Aura Edition" with Lunar Lake CPUs (Core Ultra 200V) are compatible. Knocking is meant literally, as you have to lightly touch the right edge of the screen with your phone to initiate the data exchange. Currently, Lenovo Smart Share only works with the photo gallery, so only photos and videos can be transferred between the devices. However, it is conceivable that the function will be expanded to include general file sharing, as it does not work with other file types.
The connection is not via Bluetooth, but via a WLAN connection. Intel's Unison app, which has been around for two years, does the work in the background.
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The first time we tried it out at the IFA in Berlin, both the connection and the exchange of images worked smoothly and rapidly in both directions. The pop-up window on the Windows screen opened without delay, and copying a photo from the iPhone to the Windows computer took less than two seconds. We have not yet been able to test Lenovo Smart Share with an Android smartphone, but the procedure is completely identical.
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How exactly the notebook notices that the phone is knocking remains unclear, even if the knocking is reminiscent of Near Field Communication (NFC). Lenovo spoke of AI-based recognition via "virtual sensors". What these look like remains a mystery, but it works. It is not yet known whether Lenovo will add Smart Share to other models in the future or bring the function to older devices as an update.
(sht)
