General Cross Eco-System (Macbook Air & Android Devices)

[chrism_scotland]

Looking at Ultrabooks currently its very hard (even as a long term Windows user) to ignore the M1 Macbook Air; its the right size, the screen is great, the power is unreal and the battery life looks incredible.

However despite trying I'm not ready to fully move over to a full Apple ecosystem; I've got an S21 Ultra (less important) but also a Galaxy S7+ tablet.

I guess my main worry is cross-compatibility of things like being able to sync notes and documents.

Are there others out there with a similar mixed eco-system? How do you get on with it?

 

[The_Interloper]

The key is to use cross-platform cloud-connected apps and services, e.g.:

Documents - Office 365, Google Docs etc
Notes - OneNote, Google Keep (you can even use the S-Pen with your S21U for these)
Calendars/Contacts - Outlook, Google Calendar
Messaging - WhatsApp Desktop, Google Messages for Web
Browser Bookmarks/History Sync - Microsoft Edge, Firefox, Brave

See the theme? Microsoft and Google basically provide all the tools required to make your Android and Mac devices work together. It's when you combine an iPhone with a Mac that other integrations start to appear (AirDrop, Handoff, Continuity, Clipboard Sync etc) but there are third-party apps for these too if you want to emulate even more functionality between devices.

 

[ian87w]

Looking at Ultrabooks currently its very hard (even as a long term Windows user) to ignore the M1 Macbook Air; its the right size, the screen is great, the power is unreal and the battery life looks incredible.

However despite trying I'm not ready to fully move over to a full Apple ecosystem; I've got an S21 Ultra (less important) but also a Galaxy S7+ tablet.

I guess my main worry is cross-compatibility of things like being able to sync notes and documents.

Are there others out there with a similar mixed eco-system? How do you get on with it?

This is actually very easy. I have a Galaxy S21, a Windows laptop, and a mac mini.

If you use Google services, they all work via a browser, so a mac will not be in issue.
If you use Microsoft services (eg. Office 365), they all have apps on the mac as well (OneNote, Word, OneDrive), so syncing is not an issue.

I sync my work stuff on my S21 with my mac mini using OneDrive and Office 365.

Mac syncs very well as well with Google for contacts and calendar. Or you can just use Outlook if you are on Microsoft ecosystem.

The only thing missing on the mac is the Your Phone app, which allows you to mirror your Galaxy phone, answer calls, etc on Windows.

 

[SteveJUAE]

Looking at Ultrabooks currently its very hard (even as a long term Windows user) to ignore the M1 Macbook Air; its the right size, the screen is great, the power is unreal and the battery life looks incredible.

However despite trying I'm not ready to fully move over to a full Apple ecosystem; I've got an S21 Ultra (less important) but also a Galaxy S7+ tablet.

I guess my main worry is cross-compatibility of things like being able to sync notes and documents.

Are there others out there with a similar mixed eco-system? How do you get on with it?

Not wishing to be a Debbie downer but why put yourself thru the pain, the MBA M1 is only stretching its legs if you have the software that can use it, else it's revving it's nuts off in neutral

As a windows user and the fact that surprisingly the M1 can be found heavily discounted you still have to buy parallels and a W10/11 license to use software you may have and not sure about any games possibility

Sorry if its a bit off topic to your original question but I am not lured by M1's too many compromises for long term window users IMO unless you have a niche requirement

 

[Blue Quark]

Looking at Ultrabooks currently its very hard (even as a long term Windows user) to ignore the M1 Macbook Air; its the right size, the screen is great, the power is unreal and the battery life looks incredible.

However despite trying I'm not ready to fully move over to a full Apple ecosystem; I've got an S21 Ultra (less important) but also a Galaxy S7+ tablet.

I guess my main worry is cross-compatibility of things like being able to sync notes and documents.

Are there others out there with a similar mixed eco-system? How do you get on with it?

Let me try and answer this from a different perspective.

Even though I own (and love) my M1 MacBook Air, my main OS of choice is Linux Mint. There is a useful comparison to be made here because Linux Mint is just as much not Android as macOS is.

You need to get software (I know I found and installed something on my MBA but I can't remember exactly what it is at the moment) but I think you can also download Android File Transfer from Google. It goes without saying that MTP (I think that's what Android uses) is built into most mainstream Linux distros, and of course LM is no exception.

As far as "synchronization", I don't really believe in going down that road. I'd much rather use centralized cloud services (in particular, Google's office suite) to handle tasks I need to access from multiple different devices, and in part because this assures platform independence.

Because of my job, I make daily use of this kind of thing, particularly spreadsheet and calendaring functionality.

The only real time I need to connect my phone to my computer is to do things related to initial setup (adding sounds to the Alarms, Notifications, and Ringtones folders), etc. As my phone has a microSD card reader (whereas yours does not) I only need to add to the locally-stored music on an ongoing, as needed basis (and that is exceedingly rare).