35. Windows on Mobile Devices

There were small versions, notably the pioneering Apple Newton and the incredibly successful Palm Pilot, followed by a host of similar devices called personal digital assistants (PDAs). This name captured the essence of these devices: They were personal, they were digital, and they did assist you. But they weren’t close in power to a personal computer. They never really grew up.

There were also many attempts to make PCs “grow down,” with early tablet or “slate” formats appearing in the late 1980s, and convertibles, which are laptops whose display cover can hinge back or turn around, so that it lies flat but open on the case. This got us something close to today’s tablet. However, several limitations conspired to keep them either slow or thick and heavy, and in either case, rare and expensive. Every few years starting in the 1980s someone gave a keynote speech at the huge Comdex consumer electronics show saying that tablet computers with pen input devices would soon be taking off, but they never did.

Most of the limitations were technological: With the available microprocessor CPUs, you could have either fast performance or low power usage, but not both. With the available battery technologies, it took pounds of batteries to power a fast CPU long enough to get any reasonable amount of work done. Early liquid crystal display (LCD) screens were thick, usually monochrome, and expensive. (My first color LCD monitor was 15” diagonal and cost nearly $1,000!)

Over time, the technologies improved dramatically. Screamingly fast low-power CPUs emerged. Lithium polymer technology gave us batteries the size of a matchbook that deliver power like little nuclear reactors (and their meltdowns are nearly as spectacular!). LCD display costs fell so much that CRT monitors aren’t even manufactured anymore. And advances in touchscreen technology have made the finger a viable and fairly precise input device; odd little styli, which are easily lost, are no longer necessary.

The final missing ingredient was imagination, and that was something that Steve Jobs and the team at Apple had in breathtaking abundance. What they brought to the tablet was an insistence on simplicity, performance, and perfect smoothness, both literally and figuratively. Many companies could have produced the iPad before Apple did, but nobody did, mostly because nobody but Steve Jobs believed that something could be that good. And it turns out that people really did want things that are that good. For the last several years, Apple’s revenues from iPhones and iPads have exceeded Microsoft’s revenues from everything it does and sells. (However, Android-based tablets are taking an ever-increasing bite out of iPad sales.)

The software on most tablets is essentially repurposed smartphone software: Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android were phone operating systems first and were later copied onto larger devices. These tiny operating systems grew up in a very power-, CPU-, and memory-constrained environment, and they grew to be very good while still sticking to a very lean diet. Now, mobile devices can support an operating system as complex as Windows 10. For this to happen, Windows had to learn how to run lean, and processors and batteries and Flash memory had to advance enough to meet Windows in the middle.

As we are writing this book, Microsoft is manufacturing and selling tablet computers of its own, called Microsoft Surface 3 and Surface Pro 3 versions, which have Intel processors that execute the same instruction set that’s used on desktop PCs. They run Windows 10 in its entirety, with every capability that the desktop version has. Other vendors also sell Intel-compatible tablets that can run Windows 10 Home or Pro.

An earlier generation of lower-end Microsoft Surface tablets used an ARM microprocessor, and they were sold with an operating system called Windows RT. Technically, Windows RT was almost 100% identical to Windows 8, except that its programs were turned into instructions for the ARM processor instead of the usual Intel x86 or x64 processors used in desktops and notebooks. While Microsoft claimed that it was a “new” operating system and couldn’t run traditional Windows Desktop applications, it did: It came preinstalled with Microsoft Office applications (compiled for the ARM processor), and the Desktop and the Command Prompt windows were there for everyone to see. It turned out to be fairly confusing to consumers, so the RT product line was terminated.

Windows Phone was another operating system product entirely; its program “source code” was developed entirely separately from the mainstream Windows, and it had its own features, bugs, and quirks, and its own development team.

Starting with Windows 10, Microsoft made a fairly bold decision to use just one Windows program source code for all devices, and the main capabilities are now broken into categories defined by the amount of available screen space rather than by arbitrary marketing decisions:

Phones and tablets with screens smaller than 8 inches diagonal can be manufactured with any microprocessor. They will run Windows 10 Mobile, which supports Modern-style apps but not traditional desktop apps (thus, no Microsoft Office).

Desktops and devices with screens 8 inches diagonal or larger and with an Intel-compatible processor (only) can run the full version of Windows 10 Home or Pro. Applications can be Modern or traditional desktop apps.

This book was written with the second, more capable category of devices that run Windows 10 Home or Pro in mind. But, for the most part, tablets and phones running Window 10 Mobile can be used and managed in the same way. The underlying operating systems are the same, and almost all of its settings screens are the same.

In this chapter, we show you how Windows 10 helps you get the most out of a portable device’s hardware, whether it’s a tablet or laptop or a convertible that lands somewhere in between. In subsequent chapters, we focus on networking and tools that you can use with both portable or desktop computers for working while away from home or the office.

Even when Airplane mode is active, you can separately turn Wi-Fi networking on or off using the Wi-Fi button, which is also located on the Network panel shown in Figure 35.1. This lets you, for example, take advantage of in-flight Wi-Fi while still leaving cellular voice and data radios turned off.

To see how to open the Action Center, see “Tune Up the Taskbar, Action Center, and Start Menu,” p. 82.

Additionally, devices can conserve energy by dimming the backlight lamp that illuminates the display, and by turning off hardware devices such as the disk drive, DVD or CD drive, network adapter, GPS, modem, and so on when they are not actively being used.

Of course, when you’re watching a movie (which requires a lot of processor effort to decode the DVD’s data into millions of pixels per second) or performing heavy-duty calculations, power consumption can go way up.

You can adjust how Windows manages hardware power consumption, and how fast the processor is allowed to run, by creating power profiles. These are collections of settings that can be applied in different situations. We discuss them shortly. In addition, Windows 10 has a new feature called Battery Saver that kicks in when your battery runs low to take additional power-saving measures.

By default, Battery Saver kicks in when your device is running on battery power and the battery falls below 20% charged, push notifications from apps are still allowed, and no app can continue to run when in the background. When your device is on battery power, you can also manually turn Battery Saver on or off. To do this, click or touch the battery icon in the taskbar; then click or touch Battery Saver Settings, as shown in Figure 35.2. When Battery Saver is active, the Battery Saver button is lit up, and a leaf appears in the battery icon in this panel and in the taskbar.

If Battery Saver ends up annoying you, you change these settings using either of these methods:

Click the battery icon in the taskbar to display the battery panel. Then select Power & Sleep Settings, Battery Saver (at left), Battery Saver Settings.

In the taskbar’s Search box, type battery. Then, in the results under Settings, select Change Battery Saver Settings.

Then you can make any of the following changes:

Uncheck Turn Battery Saver On Automatically.... You can then control Battery Saver manually by clicking the Battery icon in the taskbar and using the Battery Saver button.

Change the threshold at which Battery Saver kicks in.

Uncheck Lower Screen Brightness... to stop Battery Saver from dimming the screen.

Check Allow Push Notifications... if you want apps to post notifications while the battery is low; by default, they don’t.

Click + to add an app that you want to allow to run in the background even when the battery is low. (You will probably want to do this only after you find yourself annoyed when a given app doesn’t run.)

Click the name of an app, and then click Remove to remove an app from the exceptions list.

You can get more fine-grained control of how power is consumed when running on batteries by working with power profiles.

Balanced—Select this profile to strike a fair balance between power savings and performance. You’ll still get full processing power when it’s needed. When a portable device is unplugged, display brightness is automatically reduced and the device goes to sleep sooner than when it’s plugged in.

Power Saver—Select this profile when you want to extend the battery life as long as possible, even if it noticeably slows the processor. Windows may also eliminate some graphical effects.

High Performance—Select this profile when you want maximum speed even when your computer is running on battery power. (You might need to click the arrow next to Show Additional Plans to see this option.)

To view, choose, or modify power profiles, use one of these methods:

Right-click the Start button or press Windows Logo+X, and then select Power Options.

Right-click the battery icon in the taskbar and select Power Options.

In the taskbar’s Search box, type power. From the results, select Power Options.

In the Power Options screen that opens, you can select the profile you want to use at any given time. You can use the slider at the bottom to adjust the screen brightness.

To select what settings are put into effect by each profile, click the phrase Change Plan Settings next to a profile name. This displays the window shown in Figure 35.3. Here, you can select how long Windows should wait before darkening the screen and putting the computer to sleep when idle, under AC power and battery power.

If you rarely stop while you are actually working, but tend to leave for a while when you do stop, you might gain additional battery life by reducing the time before turning off the display or shutting down when on battery power. Dimming the display can help, too, if you’re not working outdoors.

To really change the speed-versus-power compromise, click Change Advanced Power Settings to get the dialog box shown in Figure 35.4. Here, you can change quite a number of power-related delays and rates. Each setting has two values: one to use when on AC power and another to use when on battery power. Start by clicking Change Settings That Are Currently Unavailable to gain access to the entire list of settings.

If you really do love tweaking, you can click the + next to the item to expand it and look at some of the more interesting advanced settings:

Hard Disk—Set the time that the disk is allowed to spin after being used. The default time on battery is 10 minutes. If your usage pattern usually spins the disk right back up just after it shuts down, you might increase this time. If your device has a solid state disk (SSD), this setting is not relevant.

Wireless Adapter Settings—You can choose any of four settings, from Maximum Performance to Maximum Power Saving (and presumably slower and less reliable data transfer). If your wireless access point is nearby, Maximum Power Saving might help extend battery life. (And as mentioned earlier in the chapter, you can use the Airplane Mode switch on the Networks panel to completely turn off your device’s data radio.)

Sleep—Hybrid Sleep is a mode in which Windows will wake up the computer after a certain time in Sleep mode (the Hibernate After time) and perform a full hibernate. You can extend battery life by reducing the Hibernate After time. The trade-off is that Windows takes longer to start up after hibernating.

Processor Power Management—You can set the lowest and highest processor states (speeds) in terms of % of maximum speed. Setting a low minimum speed increases battery life without costing much in performance. Reducing the maximum speed helps battery life but also takes a bite out of performance.

Multimedia Settings—If you use Windows Media Sharing, this setting can prevent Windows from going to sleep while it’s sharing media. Sleep cuts off your remote players.

Battery—You can select the battery percentage levels at which Windows takes action to warn you about power loss or shutdown, and what actions to take at low and critically low power levels. You should not select Sleep as the Critical Battery Action, because Windows might not be able to keep system RAM alive when the battery level falls even further. If the battery dies in Sleep mode, you may lose unsaved data.

Right-click the battery icon in the taskbar and select Windows Mobility Center.

Right-click the Start button and select Mobility Center.

In the taskbar’s Search box, type mobil. From the search results, select Windows Mobility Center.

The Windows Mobility Center is normally available only on mobile devices and laptops. To trick Windows into letting you use it on a desktop computer, see the note on p. 880.

The Windows Mobility Center is designed to bring together in one window most of the settings you’ll want to change while using your portable computer remotely. The settings pertain mostly to power management (so you can make your device’s battery last as long as possible) and display management, because many people use laptops to make business and school presentations. Your computer’s Windows Mobility Center may display some or all of the following controls:

Brightness—The slider lets you increase or decrease your screen’s backlight brightness. A lower setting should make your computer run longer on a battery charge. Windows remembers separate brightness settings for battery- and AC-powered operation, stores them as part of a power profile, and selects the chosen brightness level when the power status changes. (Alternatively, you can click or touch the battery icon in the taskbar, and then click or touch the Brightness button to change brightness in 25% steps.)

Volume—The slider controls your computer’s speaker volume, and the Mute check box lets you instantly shut off the sound. This capability may be useful, for example, if you’re in a meeting and someone keeps sending you noisy IM pop-ups. (And again, there is also a volume control in the taskbar that you control by clicking the Speakers/Headphones icon.)

Battery Status—The icon shows you whether you are running on AC or battery-only power. (The power plug in the icon shown in Figure 35.1 indicates that the computer is on AC power.) The drop-down list lets you select a power profile. Power profiles let you choose a balance between lower power consumption and greater performance. We discussed power profiles in the previous section, “Getting the Most Out of Your Battery.”

Screen Orientation—On tablet PCs, this control lets you switch the display between portrait (taller than wide) and landscape (wider than tall) orientation. Generally, in portrait orientation, it’s easier to read documents, and in landscape, it’s easier to watch movies.

External Display—When an external display monitor or projector has been connected to your computer’s external display connector, this control lets you select what appears on the external display. We discuss External Display in detail in Chapter 38, “Meetings, Conferencing, and Collaboration.” (By the way, you can also control internal and external display by pressing Windows Logo+P.)

Sync Center—The Sync Center is used to copy files to or from an external device such as a smartphone, or to update copies of network server files that you’ve obtained using the Offline Files feature. We discuss Sync Center in the section “Offline Files” in Chapter 37, “Networking on the Road.”

Presentation Settings—When you turn on Presentation Settings, Windows suppresses some behaviors that could disrupt your presentation. We discuss Presentation Settings in Chapter 38.

Your device’s manufacturer might have added additional controls not listed here.

One thing to remember, which isn’t obvious from looking, is that for most of the tiles in the Mobility Center, you can click on the graphical icons to change the associated settings. For example, under Presentation Settings, the button just says Turn On. You can click the little projector icon to change what Presentation Mode actually does.

Even with a keyboard, sometimes you might want to use some of the following five methods:

Use the Touch Keyboard

Use the On Screen Keyboard

Use your fingers on a multitouch screen (a screen that can track multiple touch points at the same time, so that it can distinguish gestures that involve one, two, three fingers, or more)

Use a stylus or pen to draw

Use your fingers or a pen with handwriting recognition

Each technique receives some special assists from Windows, as you’ll see.

You can also use a mouse or stylus with the Touch Keyboard. Several physical layouts are available for the Touch Keyboard. You can change layouts by touching or clicking the keyboard icon at the bottom right of the Touch Keyboard, as shown in Figure 35.6. The layout options are as follows:

Default Layout—This layout has large, widely spaced keys. It’s nice on a tablet-sized screen. You can press and hold, or touch and flick, keys to get digits from the top row of keys or accented letters from many of the letter keys. You can press &123 to display a set of symbols and a numeric keypad with the numbers arranged as on a telephone (1 at top). Microsoft did extensive research and testing to come up with this layout and is justifiably proud of it.

Split Layout—This keyboard shifts the left- and right-hand keys to the edges of the screen. It’s appropriate for thumb typing on a phone-sized screen.

Handwriting Input—This isn’t a keyboard as such; instead, it lets you enter and edit text using a stylus or pen (or mouse or finger, in a pinch). Handwriting input is discussed under “Using Handwriting Recognition,” later in this chapter.

Standard Layout—This layout uses the familiar standard IBM PC keyboard layout. It’s the only Touch Keyboard layout that lets you use the Windows Logo key, which is part of many Windows keyboard shortcuts.

The Standard layout option isn’t available by default. The icon will be there, but it’s grayed out and unselectable. To enable it, click or touch Start; then select Settings, Devices, Typing. Scroll down to the bottom of the Touch Keyboard section and turn on Add the Standard Keyboard Layout As a Touch Keyboard Option.

You can’t have both the Touch Keyboard and the OSK on the screen at the same time. Opening one closes the other. However, you can use either one with both desktop and Modern-style apps.

We give you a quick run-through of the most important touch gestures in “The Touch Tour,” p. 65, and we also cover touch input and gestures under “Navigating Windows 10 with a Touch Interface,” p. 109.

For more precise work, you can purchase specialized electronic drawing pads or tablets that have a much finer measurement resolution, often a hundredth of an inch or less. These come with an electronic stylus or pen that has one or more buttons on it, which can signal the computer when you squeeze the buttons or press the stylus against the pad. They are especially useful with professional drafting and drawing applications and can be more comfortable to use than a touchscreen because they lie flat on your desk. The Wacom Bamboo product line is a good example of this type of drawing pad.

Whether you use one of these pads or a stylus pressed to your touchscreen, Windows 10 has special entry modes for pens and styli. These have evolved as part of Microsoft’s long-term interest in “pen computing,” which was demonstrated by its first pen-input software release in 1991 and continues to this day. (Remember earlier in the chapter when we referred to those recurrent “The Tablet Is Coming” keynote speeches at Comdex? Bill Gates was giving them as far back as 1994.) Windows interacts with pens in two ways: through Pen Flicks, where Windows recognizes some specific pen gestures, and handwriting recognition, where handwritten letters are turned into typewritten characters. We discuss these in the following sections. Pen Flicks will be available only if your computer has an input device that Windows recognizes as a pen or stylus device.

You also might want to check out the note-taking tool called Windows Journal. It’s a great example of how useful pen technology can be. It’s covered in Chapter 8, in the section titled “Windows Journal.”

To tell Windows whether you’re left or right handed—In the taskbar’s Search box, type tablet pc and select Tablet PC Settings from the search results. Select the Other tab and set your handedness preference. This tells Windows to display balloon notifications where you can see them, not underneath your pen or hand.

If your pen or finger can’t move the cursor to the full extremes of your screen—In the taskbar’s Search box, type tablet pc and select Tablet PC Settings from the search results. Select the Display tab and click or touch Calibrate. Click Yes at the User Account Control prompt, and then tap the crosshair each time it appears on the screen, as directed. Click Yes to save the calibration data.

To set the direction that your screen rotates—If your device has a button that changes the screen orientation, view the Display tab as described in the preceding item and select Go To Orientation.

Set Tablet Buttons to Perform Certain Tasks—In the taskbar’s Search box, type tablet and select Set Tablet Buttons to Perform Certain Tasks.

To select the pen gestures that equate to single-, double-, and right-clicks—In the taskbar’s Search box, type the two words pen and. Then select Pen and Touch from the search results. Change entries in the Pen Actions section.

We discuss other settings such as Pen Flicks in subsequent sections of this chapter.

To enable and configure Pen Flicks, in the taskbar’s Search box, type flicks. From the search results, select Set Flicks to Perform Certain Tasks. There you can entirely enable or disable Pen Flicks, and you can elect to have the pen perform navigation only or both navigation and editing. Figure 35.7a shows Flicks set to perform both functions.

To perform a Flick, press the pen to your screen or input tablet and quickly snap it a short distance up, down, left, or right, with the pen rising off the surface at the end of the gesture. Flick as if you were trying to brush away a spot of dirt on the screen. If you’ve enabled Navigational and Editing Flicks, you can flick diagonally as well, giving you eight possible flick gestures. In the Pen and Touch dialog box, you can select Practice Using Flicks to bring up a tutorial window that teaches you how to reliably perform a Flick gesture.

In the Pen and Touch dialog box, you can also click Customize to change the interpretation of the four or eight Flicks. The Customize Flicks dialog box is shown in Figure 35.7b.

The default functions are listed in Table 35.1.

You can change the meaning of these Flicks to any of the 20 predefined actions, such as Cut, Open, or Save, or you can map a flick to a keystroke, such as Alt+M or Ctrl+Ins.

The manufacturer of your stylus screen or pen device may have added additional functions not described here. Check its documentation, or you can open the Control Panel, select View By: Small Icons, and look for a nonstandard Control Panel item added by the device’s manufacturer. For example, the Wacom device mentioned earlier adds a Control Panel applet named Bamboo Preferences.

To write, open the Touch Keyboard, touch or click the Keyboard icon, and select the Handwriting Input icon shown previously. The Handwriting Input panel appears as shown in Figure 35.8. Simply write on line in the input box using either separate (block) letters or cursive, which, amazingly, Windows does a very good job of recognizing. It does this by looking up likely words in an internal dictionary of your local language, so if you write a word that isn’t in the dictionary, it is much less likely to get the word right. You can train it to recognize new words, though, as described shortly.

As Windows tries to recognize each word, it displays its best guesses above the text area. When it shows the word you want, you can stop writing and touch the word to finish and accept it. As you write, Windows transfers the words it’s recognized into the application that is taking input. It types as you go rather than waiting for you to accept the text, as in previous versions of Windows.

The two icons at the top-right end of the text input box shown in Figure 35.8 insert a space and delete what you’ve written. The two icons at the bottom-right end of the box press the Enter key and bring up the keyboard options.

Deleting—To delete a written letter, draw a line backward through it. Be sure to draw across the full width of the characters you want to delete.

Joining—To join two separate words, draw a line backward underneath the horizontal line in the text input box, from the beginning of the second word back to the end of the first word, curving a little down and back up. In other words, make a little smile linking the two words.

The deleting and joining gestures are illustrated in Figure 35.9. More often than not, you won’t need to use them; Windows often guesses the correct word or words by itself, and you can simply choose them from the list displayed above the input region.

Windows will slowly learn to accommodate those quirks on its own if you use the Correcting mode described in the previous section to choose the alternate spellings that Windows suggests or to add new words to the dictionary. You can speed up the learning process considerably by doing a little one-on-one training (which Microsoft calls personalization) with the handwriting system.

To start the Handwriting Personalization Wizard, click or touch Start, Settings, Time & Language. Scroll down and select Additional Date, Time & Regional Settings, Change Input Methods. To the right of your primary input language, select Options, Personalize Handwriting Recognition. (That should do it, but, if there is no such option, open File Explorer and browse into the following folders: This PC, Local Disk C:, Program Files, Common Files, Microsoft Shared, Ink. Scroll down and double-click the ShapeCollector application file.)

The Handwriting Personalization Wizard appears. You can perform any or all of the following training exercises:

To run through a standardized training session—Click Teach the Recognizer Your Handwriting Style, Sentences. Write the requested sentences and symbols in your own, most comfortable writing style. This takes awhile. There are 50 sentences to write!

After the arduous Sentences session, if you want Windows to learn to recognize your handwritten numbers and other symbols, click Teach the Recognizer Your Handwriting Style, Numbers, Symbols and Letters.

To teach Windows to recognize a specific word that it has trouble with—Click Target Specific Recognition Errors, Character or Word You Specify.

To help Windows distinguish between similar letter forms—Select Target Specific Recognition Errors, Characters with Similar Shapes.