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Today’s mobile operating systems offer the best of features and possibilities, run the same set of apps, bring in new themes, let you prolong your phone’s battery life and multi-task with ease. But when it comes down to experiencing operating systems, buyers have to make the hard choice of choosing any one among them that suits them best or supports the apps that they want to access. But what if you could use a phone which could run two operating systems in tandem, say, both Android and Windows 10 and get to use both Continuum and the Play Store at the same time? Global Electronics giant Samsung has apparently thought this over, and the company has just won a patent for a phone on which you can switch between Android and Windows operating systems with great ease.
The patent in question was awarded to Samsung in South Korea earlier today but filed in May of last year, and shows images of a phone that could run both operating systems. According to the diagrams, a user can switch between both operating systems, drag and drop files between them and can minimize either of them to a floating icon. A user could view the two systems just like we now view apps in multi-window formats and could even ensure that common files could be accessed by both systems so that they could edit them or share them no matter which OS is active at a given point of time. What’s more, each of these operating systems could be assigned processor cores and RAM to ensure that they do not make phones suffer from performance lags due to their memory usage.
While running two operating systems at the same time on their phones could be taxing for some users, Mobile OS-makers like Microsoft, Ubuntu, and BlackBerry could see a surge in their sales if people chose to buy phones with both Android and their respective operating systems. To be fair, Samsung has only won the patent today and it will take some time for the company to commercialize the technology, if it even intends to. Samsung’s home-grown Tizen OS has done well with wearables and other smart devices but hasn’t really kicked off in the smartphone front, and it is possible that the company could club the OS with Android to give it more attention and to make it commercially viable. If the technology is shared, then apart from Samsung, other phone makers may also run other operating systems in their phones rather than mimicking the looks and features of existing operating systems. The idea seems brilliant on paper, but it’s real significance lies on when it will be launched and how phone buyers from across the world will respond to it.
