Samsung hints at a new life for Windows as an Android app

An illustration from Samsung's patent application.

 Credit: Samsung

Samsung’s patent suggests a more interesting future: combining the most popular smartphone OS with the most popular PC OS, directly on the device. Even if it comes to pass, however, there will still be issues to solve. A key one will be performance, as virtualized apps usually don’t have access to the full slate of hardware resources otherwise used by the host OS, and thus run slower and less effectively. Still, millions of users continue to turn to PCs, rather than their Android devices, to get intensive work done. A virtualized Windows space would help narrow that gap.

“In this specification, the case where as an example, the first operating system is the android, the second operating system is the window (Windows) is shown,” the patent’s translation reads. But the patent also makes clear than any OS could be used, including Tizen, Linux, or MacOS.

The Samsung patent application, reported on SamMobile and MSPowerUser, covers all sorts of digital devices, according to Samsung: smartphones, tablet PCs, notebook computers, and more. (The patent, filed in Korean, was translated via the Korean Intellectual Property Office’s machine translation system.)