Microsoft’s Your Phone app for Windows 10 keeps getting new features. At launch, it was basically a tool for sharing photos and websites between a smartphone and a PC. This year it gained support for mirroring an Android phone screen on your PC and then for displaying smartphone notifications on your computer.
Now Microsoft has announced a whole bunch of new features are on the way — and you can try them out now if you’re a member of the Windows 10 Insider program.
Among other things, there are new accessibility features, support for additional phones, the ability to send GIFs and other images via SMS from your desktop, support for in-line replies and contact image synchronization, and support for syncing over mobile data.
Here’s a roundup of recent tech news from around the web.
- Windows 10 Insider Preview Build 18908 [Microsoft]
The new Phone Screen features are the most notable thing about this udpate. But there are also a number of bug fixes… and Microsoft has temporarily stopped rolling out new Settings header and File Explorer search experiments while addressing issues reported by Insiders. - ASUS Tinker Edge T & CR1S-CM-A SBC [CNX-Software]
These new single-board computers from Asus feature NXP i.MX 8M quad-core processors, 1GB RAM, 8GB storage, and Google Edge TPU for machine learning and related projects. - Microsoft looks ready to add another Windows 10 Edition [ZDNet]
Dell mentioned an unannounced Windows Home Ultra in the list of OS options for an upcoming laptop. I have no idea what that means, but rumor has it that MS does have plans to launch new SKUs at some point. - Intel launches 9th-gen Core processors with vPro [Intel]
The new chips include 45 watt H-series mobile processors and we can expect to see laptops with the new processors from Acer, Asus, Dell, HP, and Lenovo. - MSI unveils P100 Creator is a small form-factor, high-performance desktop PC [AnandTech]
The MSI P100 Creator is a slim form-factor desktop computer with support for up to a 120W processor and a design aesthetic that doesn’t scream “gamer” (like the company’s Trident line of compact PCs do) - Work in progress Android launcher app brings a pretty full-featured desktop mode to Android Q. [reddit]
Android Q has a hidden desktop mode, but this third-party launcher app brings it out into the open (and builds upon it).
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Same here but worse… It was half working before (SMS but no MMS) and it won’t connect after the “upgrade”.
In this day and age with web version of Google Messages it’s easier to just pin a browser tab.
i agree zdanee, heard all this news, decided to try it out and see if it would be good for the wife to use, boy was i surprised at how unfriendly it was. i have a moto z2 force and i made the initial connection, but it never sync’ed, did run a long time on the android side but in the end with lack of settings or troubleshooting options, i just deleted everything i had done and went back on my merry way of minimal windows 10 intrusion.
I’ve checked out this android companion app in windows last month and it was borderline useless. It had me download an app on the phone had to give it all the privileges then all it could do was list my most recent 10 messages and my most recently taken 10 photos. It also downscaled the photos to somewhere about 1280×1024 or something similar. It could do screen mirroring, but no input, so I still had to use the phone to do anything beyond gazing at my wonderful lockscreen wallpaper. The latency was also several seconds. There were no settings, no useful functions. I deleted the app from the phone after that. I want to be able to answer calls on the PC, have full control of my messages and gallery, install or remove apps from the phone using the PC interface, maybe make backups and such.