We didn’t see too many interesting new features at Microsoft’s Build 2018 conference: Your Phone is the most eye-catching.
Microsoft has just released the spring update for Windows 10 but is already talking about the one that will come in the fall, possibly in November. One of the most interesting new features is the YourPhone application, compatible with Android and iOS devices, which allows you to connect your mobile phone to your computer, from which you can access photos, notifications and SMS messages from your phone.
Of all the things shown by Redmond’s giant, perhaps the most developed application is the latter, which allows you to manage SMS from your computer as if it were a Telegram or WhatsApp-style computer messaging application. That is, with the messages of the contact that we have selected as the main window with the possibility of replying and a column of available conversations on the left. And as with these apps, we can drag files (for example, photos) from the computer and send them by SMS.
You can also open mobile phone notifications inside YourPhone and even open them if you have an equivalent application installed on your computer, even offering suggestions for installing it if you do not have it. Also, if possible, they will open in the browser.
Finally, you can access all the photos stored on your phone and select any of them to edit or save them on your computer much more easily than before.
Also, if we decide to install Microsoft Launcher on our mobile phone to replace the current home screen of our phone what we do on our mobile will be integrated with one of the new features of Windows 10: the Timeline. In this way, both from the computer and from the mobile phone we can easily access the latest documents we have been working on or web pages we have visited recently, whether we did it on the PC or on the mobile phone.
Although Microsoft has abandoned the development of Windows 10 for mobile, it seems that its intention now is to move forward in the integration of its operating system for PC increasingly with our Android phones. With iPhone, it will be more difficult, if not impossible, because Apple doesn’t give third-party developers as much freedom as Microsoft to customize such essential features as the home screen.