Lenovo Smart Share: smartphone and notebook in duet

It’s not always easy to exchange photos between your smartphone and PC without going through the cloud or fiddling with cables. Lenovo is introducing Smart Share, a new feature on its Windows notebooks that aims to solve this problem.

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To bring your smartphone and notebook together, the phones just have to be knocked. Smart Share supports both iPhones and Android devices, but initially only Lenovo’s x86 notebooks from the new “Aura Edition” with Lunar Lake CPUs (Core Ultra 200V) are compatible. Call waiting is literally called calling, as you have to lightly touch the right edge of the screen with your phone to start the data exchange. Currently, Lenovo Smart Share only works with photo galleries, so only photos and videos can be transferred between devices. However, it can be assumed that the function will be expanded to include general file sharing; otherwise it does not work with other file types.

The connection is not via Bluetooth, but via a WLAN connection. In the background, Intel’s Unison app does the work it has been doing for two years.

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The connection is straightforward

When we tried it for the first time at IFA in Berlin, the connection and exchange of images in both directions worked smoothly and very quickly. The pop-up window opened on the Windows screen without any delay; copying a photo from an iPhone to a Windows computer took less than two seconds. We have not yet been able to test Lenovo Smart Share with an Android smartphone, but the process is completely identical.

How exactly the notebook notices that the phone is knocking remains unclear, even if call waiting is reminiscent of Near Field Communication (NFC). Lenovo spoke of AI-based recognition through “virtual sensors”. How they look remains a mystery, but it works. It is not yet known whether Lenovo will add Smart Share to other models in the future or whether it will bring the function to older devices as an update.

(shhh)