Latest Windows 10 build will support “Your Phone” content sharing

Enlarge / With Your Phone you can drag and drop a photo from the phone onto the PC, without having to plug the phone in. (credit: Microsoft)

Back at its Build conference in May, Microsoft showed Your Phone, a Windows 10 app (with companion apps on Android and iOS) that helped bridge between the smartphone world and the PC world. The company showed syncing of photos, SMS messages, and notifications between the phone and the PC, hoping to put an end to time-honored traditions such as e-mailing yourself a picture you took on your phone just so you can use it on your computer.

The latest Insider Preview build of this autumn's Windows 10 update, released yesterday, finally enables this syncing. Or at least, it enables the Windows-side portion of it. The phone-side updates are merely "coming soon." An Android app, requiring Android 7.0 or better, will soon be available to handle the necessary work on the phone.

Initially, it appears that the focus will be only on the photo syncing (it's the only thing Microsoft mentions in its latest blog post, and the screenshot above shows that there's only a "Photos" section in the navigation bar). This is generally the easiest thing to sync, but it's also probably the most useful. SMS integration will be Android-only anyway (iOS apps aren't allowed to read or send SMSes), and notification syncing is going to be complex. Microsoft wants the notifications to be actionable on the PC, such that clicking, say, a notification from Instagram will open the Instagram app on Windows. This will be powerful and seamless if it works well but will require much more engineering effort than merely mirroring the notification text from the phone onto the PC.

Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments