Transcript
Paul Throt (0:00)
Coming up next on Hands on Windows, we're going to take a look at some cool new features in Phone Link in Windows 11, including the beginning of some phone integration features with copilot.
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Paul Throt (2:13)
Podcasts you love from people you trust. This is twit. Hello everybody and welcome back to Hands on Windows. I'm Paul Throt and this week we're going to take another look at Phonelink. This is the application Windows 11 that allows you to integrate your smartphone with the Windows 11 OS. We have looked at this in the past, of course the last time was actually quite some time ago, but I think you'll recall that there are basic features you get with an iPhone, limited in some ways. A lot more features with an Android phone. And then if you have a Samsung flagship phone or some. A few other phones, you get the kind of, you know, the full meal deal with all the features including screen sharing and remote apps and all that kind of stuff. But since the last time we discussed this, Phone Link has evolved. There's some features that we've talked about in previous episodes tied to 24H2, where the start menu is going to have like a phone link integration pane on the side that's been delayed. So I got that feature briefly. Microsoft took it away. I still don't have it, but that will be coming eventually. If you have an Android phone, you can also make a phone call from a conversation and chat from Phone Link, which is a fairly new feature. But I wanted to talk about three or four big bucket new features which I think are really cool beyond that that I actually can show you at least. So the first one is file system integration. So most people probably know that if you. If I can get a window going. Here, let me try that again. If you have a phone connected to your computer with a USB cable, you can, if you know, assuming it's configured correctly on the phone, browse through the file system or in an iPhone, just price, browse through your photos basically and then copy files back and forth. Right. And that's kind of a handy thing to do so with Android phones only this doesn't work with iPhone, yet you can actually just have your phone appear in File Explorer regardless of whether it's connected with a cable. So in this case, my phone is here. It's not connected, you know, not connected, wire, wired, connected to anything. But it's still available in File Explorer. Right. And so if I just. Oops, sorry, clicked on the wrong thing, go in, you can see storage and then you'll see the whole file system of that particular phone. Right. So if I go to movies, Instagram. Yeah, a couple of videos here. These are from a little while ago, but I can copy it out to the desktop. It happens pretty quick, you know, over WI Fi. It's not a very big file, but I can run that locally. And this is just a. What is this? This is off the video from Niagara Falls last year. So pretty cool, but like straight off the phone. So, you know, fairly obvious functionality but just a nice addition. You don't have to worry about wires and all that kind of stuff. So that's kind of cool. We've talked a lot about sharing in Windows 11 over the past months and years too. Actually that share is a feature that's continually updating. I know we talked about some forms of sharing this drag and drop sharing, et cetera, et cetera. But when you go to share a file now that your phone is a choice, assuming you have an Android phone again, right? So I had the same tired set of photos that I keep using. I'm going to try to maybe update those sometime soon. But when you rightclick share you get that new share interface which we talked about in a previous episode. And now my phone is one of those choices. And so when you go to that, oh, it's just not connected properly. Let me just make sure these guys are connected. But generally speaking this actually works pretty good. But this is of course the the problem with phone link, if you will. Sometimes it's a little bit unreliable, but normally what happens is you get a, you know, a banner like you saw there. It will say okay, this thing has made it through. And then on the phone you'll see a notification from link to Windows, which is the app that does the connectivity on the phone and that will show you that the file has downloaded. You tap it and it opens the files app on Android, the Google Files app, and then you can see that file on your phone and you can open it, do whatever you want with it. So that is usually pretty good.