Motorola and its parent company Lenovo have partnered on the launch of a new Windows 11 app promising to make mobile multitasking less of a hassle. Called Smart Connect, this app turns any Windows 11 laptop into a connectivity hub for users with Motorola smartphones and Lenovo tablets.
People who switch between work on their laptop, tablet, and phone throughout the day know the struggle of making their devices all play nice together. While Apple is perhaps best known for its exemplar ecosystem, it's not perfect, and it's certainly not cross-brand compatible. The Smart Connect app looks to bring some conveniences to Lenovo and Motorola customers, even if they own a third-party computer.
Available for all Windows 11 laptops in the coming months, Smart Connect is a software solution that syncs your computer select Motorola phones (including the Razr, Edge and G families) and Lenovo Tabs. There are a number of different multitasking actions possible with the devices paired, many of which the Motorola and Lenovo demoed at MWC 2024.
Most simply, you could drag and drop a photo from your laptop to your tablet or copy a file on your laptop and paste it in a chat on your phone. You can toss entertainment playback between your devices, all while using your laptop's trackpad and keyboard on any of the three screens.
But the coolest implementation the companies showed us is how Smart Connect can detect when a phone has moved away from a paired laptop, and automatically launch a small mirrored smartphone window on the laptop's display. Whether you need to leave your phone elsewhere to charge, or simply want to keep an eye on your messaging apps without looking away from your laptop, this seems like it could come in handy.
You can easily mirror your iPhone to your MacBook via AirPlay, but doing so takes up the entire laptop screen. You can also use your Samsung Galaxy phone as computer when plugged into an external display via Samsung DeX, although the software didn't get the overhaul we were hoping for with the Galaxy S24 Ultra. Smart Connect seems to fall somewhere between these rivaling systems with a refreshed take offering flexibility for users with multiple brands of devices.
Motorola and Lenovo haven't set an official launch date for Smart Connect in the Microsoft Store or Google Play Store, but the version we saw at MWC seemed pretty functional for beta software. That's to say, it's probably not very far from release.
