Ask Paul: September 6 (Premium)

Happy Friday! I got off to a bit of a late start, but hopefully this will still be a great way to start the weekend.
Note 10+ and Samsung apps
yoshi asks:

Paul, I was just curious what your approach with the Note 10+ will be when it comes to apps. Will you be giving the stock Samsung apps a try? Such as Messages. Or will you download Google, MS, etc. apps in place of the stock apps?

I’m going to try and use the Samsung apps and services as much as possible. Some of that won’t be too difficult, but the Bixby Home interface is pretty terrible compared to the Google feed, and I have put the Google app on a home screen so I can access the latter. We’ll see how it goes. In some cases, like Messages, I don’t think it will be problematic. For others …  I don’t know.

I will continue using things like Google Photos and OneDrive for photo backup, of course. And I noticed there was no news app on the device, unless you consider Bixby Home to fall into that category. (I installed Google News.) I will keep using Gmail and Outlook for mail.

I will say that I really like the Samsung shell. Going back to the Pixel 3a XL from time to time, it already seems a bit old-fashioned by comparison.
Sharing with a family in OneDrive
vernonlvincent asks:

I have an Office 365 Home subscription (the one that let me have 5 family members each with Office and OneDrive storage) and was wondering if there's a way for me to access my children's OneDrive folders online without having to log in as them? I find that there are times where I want to give them things (like MP3s for them to sync to their mobile devices) and I'd like to just upload them directly from my computer without having to (for example) log in on their machines as them, access a shared local folder with the files, and then upload them from their machine to their OneDrive storage. Alternately (or maybe separately) - is there a 'family' OneDrive folder (like the Family calendar and Family group in Outlook) for documents and files that I'd like to be available to the whole family?

There’s nothing like that that I’m aware of, but now that you mention it, it’s a good idea and given the point of Office 365 Home, perhaps necessary.

I generally share using the Share functionality in OneDrive. Assuming your kids are old enough, this should work: They’ll be notified about the content you’re sharing and will have to copy it to wherever they wish to keep it.

A better solution, assuming one exists, is to find a third party cloud storage utility that lets you sign-in to multiple OneDrive accounts. It’s been a long time since I’ve used such a thing, but I used ODrive back in the day and that (or something like it) might do it.

Has anyone else used a utility like this?
Third-party Surface Hub 2
jchampeau asks:

You got excited about Surface Hub 2 a while back.  Do you think there will ever be a set-top box of some sort that would allow companies who already hav...

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