The synth is very powerful and open door to many different synth techniques. It can recreate any real instruments (strings, wind, percussion, bass, voices...) and it allows to build unique sound using standard and special oscillators (additive, modal, physical, granular...).
It comes with eagenmatrix application. It is like a synth interface program that resemble EMS Synthi A control matrix on steroids. It allows to use formulas to have a deep control of any parameters of the synth. The inputs to the formulas comes from MPE fingerboard. So it gives a high level of expressiveness to the generated sound.
The fingerboard can be used as MPE controller to another hardware or software synthesizer.
The synth can process audio. The audio input should be digital (spdif).
It is possible to use synth without computer but in order to have a deep control of the parameters or to create a patch from scratch it needs to be connected to eagenmatrix.
Unfortunately Continuum has no knobs, faders... So midi controller is a great addition to it but I wish there were few build-in faders/knobs.
Overall the synth is great for sound designer or experimental or academical music. It comes with many patches that I think is very important to study in order to learn the synth.