I got my Display Dock set up on my desk at home office and a Wireless Miracast Adapter at my office desk. The experience, for the most part, is interesting but left me ultimately wanting. Things I liked:
The not so nice things are pretty serious, though:
Truth be told, I'll probably continue to use Continuum in the coming weeks, despite the above issues. Those three issues, in my opinion, are too critical to be ignored, though.
- Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Outlook, and OneDrive are the stars right now. My entire workflow is based on that, and at no time did I not have any file or tool I need to do general office tasks.
- Solitaire. It works fine.
- Cortana worked well; was nice to have Hey Cortana and speak about what I needed.
The not so nice things are pretty serious, though:
- Microsoft Edge on Continuum for Phones is a gigantic performance bottleneck. I use a lot of SaaS tools that became frustratingly slow. I cringed through it for the sake of testing, but I spent more time waiting for JavaScript-rich pages to load (Facebook Ads Manager, Google Drive, and Zoho CRM are the biggest culprits). Continuum would be great if browser performance was great since a lot of 'missing' apps work in a desktop browser, but it was pretty awful the more you try to use web apps.
- Battery life suffers too much in a Bluetooth-Miracast situation. I found that out one day when I forgot my charger. Lasted me ~4-5 hours using Continuum for office work in addition to calls and Skype for Business calls. Makes the dock feel like it's there mostly to keep the phone charged. 4-5 hours is barely a full work day. That being said, I did really try to do everything on it exclusively.
- The desktop on Continuum is inconsistent with the desktop on a PC. I can forgive the Start Menu and no windowed mode. Why are Action Center quick actions at the top when they're on the bottom on PCs? Why can't I pin apps to the taskbar to avoid scrolling through a ton of non-Continuum apps? The Back Button present on the task bar is my signal that my Windows PC us in Tablet Mode; I get it's a concession for phone apps but it's still odd. If Continuum for Phones is trying to show a PC-like experience on a phone, it's definitely doing well in reminding me that it's not a PC.
Truth be told, I'll probably continue to use Continuum in the coming weeks, despite the above issues. Those three issues, in my opinion, are too critical to be ignored, though.