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VMware eases Windows Mobile 10's turn-your-phone-into-a-PC pain

Horizon beta for Continuum hits app store

Bleeding-edge early adopters of Windows Mobile 10 have some more balm for their Continuum pains.

Microsoft's Continuum lets you connect monitors, keyboards and mice to Windows Mobile phones to convert them into PCs. It fits in with Microsoft's universal app concept: software should just work wherever you're using Windows 10, on a desktop, laptop, tablet or cellphone.

The Continuum-ready devices launched so far lack native support for x86 apps, though, being ARM-powered devices. The gadgets require some sort of virtualization solution to run apps for which there is not yet a Universal Windows Platform (UWP) version available.

Until HP launches its Workspace service, you've been stuck with trying to get a Citrix client running in the phone's Edge browser.

Citrix's arch rival VMware, now a Dell company, has just emitted a rough mobile beta for its Horizon suite into the Windows store, which will allow some Horizon sites to kick the tyres. (Horizon provides remote-desktop capabilities to users of VMware's virtualization technology.) The client only supports remote desktop protocol right now, according to the community forum.

From our Continuum hands-on – here – we concluded that some virtualization is mandatory to get any work done, given the dearth of UWP apps. Continuum also needs to mature to support overlapping windows, we found. ®

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