Microsoft is in earnest about tying your Windows PC together with your smartphone. You can do textin
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At its October event in New York, Microsoft not only launched new Surface computers, but also announced the availability of the latest version of Windows 10, known as the unimaginatively named October 2018 Update. What was the top new capability in that release? The Your Phone app, which allows for easy sharing between a phone and your PC.
Drag and drop photos from a phone via a window on the PC. Or send web pages from a phone to the PC, where they can open immediately or reside in the Action Center for later use. You will also be able to see your PC’s Timeline on the phone once that feature is out of beta.
The catch? Most of this only works with Android phones.
Microsoft would love to get the same functionality on iPhones, but Apple closely guards its ecosystem. Android is a lot more customizable than iOS, even letting you drop in a different Launcher home screen for your phone. With Your Phone, Microsoft takes advantage of this openness to deliver some impressive linkage between the worlds of mobile and desktop.
Read on to find out how to get going with the Your Phone app to transfer photos and send text messages on your PC. The Windows 10 update is rolling out gradually, but here’s how to get it now.
This article originally appeared on PCMag.com .
You can get to the Your Phone app either from the Start menu’s All apps list or in the Settings app’s Phone section. As with any cloud service, you’ll need to sign into an account. Enter your mobile number, and the app sends a message to the phone with a link to the Your Phone companion app.
The text you receive on the phone includes a link to this app, which you can quickly install from the Google Play store.
Open the phone app and sign in with the same Microsoft account you signed in with on your PC. Approve the permissions so the app can access your photos, files, SMS messages, and voice calls.
Go to the Your Phone PC app’s Settings and toggle to on the buttons below Photos and Messages to let the app show photos and text messages from your phone. Your Phone will then send a notification to the phone asking for permissions to do so.
Voilà! Now when you take a photo on your phone, it will appear in the Your Phone app a few seconds later on the PC. Double-clicking on the photo tile opens it in the Photos app. It’s stored in a cache folder that’s not very accessible, but of course you can save from the Photos app, and you can even drag the thumbnail into another app, such as Word. This worked, but unfortunately, the image appeared upside-down, a common ailment in photo and video software. You need to be on Wi-Fi for this to work, but not necessarily the same Wi-Fi network as your phone.
You’ve already enabled Message sharing in Settings, so now just click over to the Messages tab in the Your Phone app on your PC. You’ll see that this feature is considered beta. Once again, you have the app send a notification to the phone to allow texting permission. After the phone has acknowledged your permission, the Your Phone app on the PC shows your text conversations.
Testing this showed me why the feature is in beta. When I engaged in texting with an iPhone, I only saw messages sent from the Android and the PC, not from the iPhone. When texting another Android, the messages worked on all three devices, but there was a longer delay than you associate with texting.
The other problem is that Your Phone’s texting doesn’t interact with the PC’s contact list, the People app. But that’s not a huge problem if you manage all your contacts on your phone. It would just be nice to be able to start a text from the People app. You can type a number in Your Phone to start a text, but only contacts on the Android will be found by name.
The Windows 10 Timeline, launched in the April 2018 Update, takes over the Task View to show not only multiple desktops, but also tiles showing your browsing and recently used apps. I’ve found it quite useful to locate a web page or document I viewed in the previous few days.
Currently in beta on Android, the Microsoft Launcher can show this timeline from your PC on your phone. You can opt into the preview version at the bottom of the Launcher’s page on the Google Play store. After a brief delay, you’re enrolled, and then you must update to the beta version of the app.
Swipe to the left on the home screen and you see a new Timeline tab alongside News and Glance. This worked for me without a glitch on the Asus Zenphone, letting me open Word documents and go to web pages I’d been to on my PC. But I only saw entries from Edge and Office—other PC app activity doesn’t show up, even for UWP apps like Microsoft Photos.
The holy grail of PC-phone integration is the ability to run your smartphone apps on your full-size computer. This is not yet available via Your Phone, but Microsoft said at this week’s event that it’s in the works.
