What Is Intel Unison? A New Way to Control Your Smartphone From a Laptop

pcmag.com:

Don't expect it to make an impact until 2023 and beyond, but today Intel decloaked Unison, a technology it developed in concert with an Israeli acquisition, that allows for the easy manipulation of your phone from your laptop. The aim of Unison is to enable you to stay “in flow” during your workday while juggling a smartphone and a laptop. (For now, the latter will have to be a late-model Intel Evo laptop supporting the technology.)

By letting you access and control your smartphone from a laptop, Unison aims to reduce disruptions to workflow that constant device-switching can cause. If you are trying to focus on work on your laptop, while tending to phone calls, SMSs, and app notifications on your mobile device, that can certainly fragment your attention. If suppressing those distractions altogether isn't an option, consolidating them to your laptop screen can help. 

To that end, users of Unison can put their phones, connected via Unison to their laptop, to one side, and receive and initiate calls and SMSs from the laptop, and much more. Now, some of this functionality is certainly nothing new, but what's cool about it from the phone side: It should work with Android and iOS phones, and across a host of possible connectivity permutations. That’s what sets it apart from existing phone/PC connectivity solutions, such as the Your Phone function in Windows.

At the core of Unison is technology brought in from a company called Screenovate. Intel acquired the Israeli company in 2021, an innovator in smartphone-to-display projection that was working on multidevice screen-sharing and crossover experiences in various forms. You may even have used Screenovate tech and not realized it; some system OEMs had already adopted its