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Coming up next on Hands on Windows, we're going to take a look at how well you can integrate an iPhone with Windows 11. 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 look at an unusual combination of technologies. Most people are familiar with the phonelink app in Windows 11, I assume, and are probably familiar with the fact that it works a lot better with Android, especially if you have a Samsung phone, than it does with an iPhone. But you run a Windows PC, you have an iPhone. What's this experience look like? What do you get as an iPhone user? If you use Windows, it's kind of well understood. If you have a Mac, you get all this great integration features, et cetera. We do not get that on Windows. Maybe someday, but right now, a more limited set of integration capabilities. So the most obvious, obviously, as I already mentioned it, is phone link. And so if you're familiar with the phone link app or if you use the phone link app with an Android phone, this will look a little minimalist. But we don't get all of the features that you see on Android, right? So we have notifications over here. We have a couple of little status updates here. You can refresh if needed. And then you get the two big bucket things, which are messages and calls. Calls. And sadly, there are limitations to both, especially to messages, because there's no real way for Microsoft to integrate with imessage. So you lose some capabilities like group text, for example, come through as individual texts with each of the people in the group, that kind of thing. But, you know, that's the type of thing we've talked about before. Obviously, if you go to a Samsung phone, which I will foolishly try to do here live, you get this better interface with more things going on, like a lot more things. Right. So the big ones being remote apps, the whole remote display thing, which we've looked at, and then photos integration. And the photos integration thing is kind of strange, actually, because you can connect an iPhone to a Windows PC with a USB cable and pull those whatever photos are on there off of the device. So it seems like there should be some way to integrate with the iPhone in that capacity. And there is, actually, I've already installed this. But if you go to the photos app and you haven't configured this yet, you will see this icloud photos link, as I do have here. But it will have, when you click it, it will say, oh, click here to Install this feature, and this feature being icloud. So you get icloud sorry from Microsoft Store as you do other Apple apps, which actually we're going to look at soon. And it's a little convoluted, but once you download, install and configure, which requires two FA through the Apple device, et cetera, et cetera, you get a bunch of new features. The key one to me is this iCloud Photos integration. So this occurs in the Photos app as you're seeing here. So you can just go to this location. So this is whatever apps you have, or, sorry, whatever photos you might have in your icloud photos collection, you can view them, you can edit them. So right here, this one's okay. But I could do something like this. Just rotate it in place. You could go right into the editing environment in the Photos app, which is actually pretty extensive now. And if you have a co PC like this one, you get more of these kind of AI photo editing features. And these will work right against the photos that are up in icloud. So when you. If I were to make a change here, and I won't, but you could save as a copy or just save once it's changed, and it will actually save back to icloud as well, which is kind of interesting. So that's pretty solid. But I should also just bring up the icloud app, which is, you know, appley and weird. But there's other stuff going on here too, right? So, for example, I have enabled icloud photos integration. So that happens through Photos, as I showed you, but also through the File Explorer. Right. And so if I go into pictures here, you'll see there's now an icloud Photos option. I can go into there, go into Photos, and then this is whatever 32,000 items that I have in my icloud Photos collection. That's crazy. It's also out here in the navigation bar, right along with icloud Drive, which we'll look at in a second. But same thing. This is the same view. So these are two ways to get to the same place. There's. There's iCloud integration. ICloud drive integration. I should say when you do that, it's just like anything else. If you had. Well, I do have one drive here. If I had Google Drive, I'm using Synology Drive. And now I can use Cloud Drive. I don't actually use Cloud Drive for documents, but if I did, I could go in here and access those. You can pin those. These things to Quick access, just like you do anything else. And so that gives a really nice native integration because you can also go in there and you have to go to use more options. But there is a way to use files on demand, so you can peg some of these folders or individual files to always be available. So if your computer's offline, excuse me, you can access those files just like you would with, you know, OneDrive, Google Drive, whatever. There's password and keychain integration support. I don't use Apple passwords and I use keychain because I have to on Apple devices. But this is something I've not enabled. But you could do that as well. So if you're saving passwords, say an Internet Explorer. He almost said in Microsoft Edge it would sync back and forth between the Apple passwords app and the integrated password management feature in that browser. Same thing with bookmarks, but I don't do that. And then it has this little note how you can integrate your Apple Accounts Mail Calendar contacts functionality with the new Outlook. And that I have done that also is a little convoluted. In fact, so much so that I wanted to show you a screenshot of this because it's not obvious when this comes up how you're supposed to do this. So I chose my iCloud account. It says, please create an app password for Outlook on your email provider's site. Huh. So my initial guess was that I would go to iCloud.com and find something there, because you can access your iCloud email from there. But that's not the case, actually. You have to go to the Apple account website, and from there you go into the security section, passwords, bookmarks, et cetera, and you can create an app password there. So it's account.apple.com, not iCloud.com and once you do that, you'll get a code like an app password, literally, and then you can paste it in and go from there, and it will configure Outlook for whatever capabilities that were exposed to that account type. So I set this thing up so that that Apple account was the only account. I don't use it for anything. So there's really no email in here, but you can see this kind of introductory email, and you're going to get a subset of the full range of new Outlook features. You could also just, you know, configure Microsoft account, and that would give you more of the capabilities. But it's good for basically, you know, for most of the important things. And so across contacts and calendar and email. It's, it's actually, it's actually not horrible. So the new outlook might be horrible, but if you're in Windows and that's what you want to use, so you do have that capability.