Hands-On Windows 205 transcript
Please be advised that this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word-for-word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-free version of the show.
Paul Thurrott [00:00:00]:
Coming up next on Hands on Windows, we're going to take a look at Phone Link, which is inarguably one of the more complicated apps in Windows 11. Podcasts you love from people you trust. This is TWiT. Hello everybody, and welcome back to Hands on Windows. I'm Paul Thurrott, and this week we are going to take at the a look at the Phone Link app, which is part of Windows 11. Very complicated and also a different experience depending on which type of phone you have, right? So I think most people are at least passingly familiar with the idea that if you have an iPhone, because Apple locks that stuff down, it's going to have basic features. That's what you're looking at here on the screen right now. So you can see notifications, you can see messages, there's calls, etc.
Paul Thurrott [00:00:51]:
If you have an Android phone, you're going to have a much wider set of features, which we'll also look at. There are more features within these features. So for example, there's more things you can do within text messaging on an Android phone, et cetera. But there's also other things related to phone capabilities and so forth. So we'll look at that in a moment. And if you have a recent Samsung flagship phone or a select group of other kind of high-end phones, most of which are not in the United States, so a lot of the Chinese phones or phones for other parts of the world, you get other experiences, including the ability to see the screen of the phone remotely in a window on your computer. The screen of any app, and you can have multiple apps also in their own remote windows. And then an instant hotspot feature which connects you more quickly and seamlessly to the mobile connection on your phone if that's what you want to do.
Paul Thurrott [00:01:43]:
The other main thing to know going into this is that you have to use a Microsoft account with this. There's no way around that. So if you sign in with a local account or you sign in with a Microsoft work or school account to use this app, you're actually going to have to sign in with a Microsoft account because that's how these things sync across the internet to multiple computers, multiple phones, etc. There are 2 main interfaces to this. I'm not going to go through the setup process. It's unbelievably complicated. But— and of course, I've already set up all 3 of the phones I want to show you today. But normally you would start from this interface, which would be empty.
Paul Thurrott [00:02:14]:
You don't have a phone. And then there's a QR code and you scan it with your phone, etc. But the way that you configure those devices is actually not in this app. It's in the Settings app. And if you go into Bluetooth and Devices, you'll see Mobile Devices is pretty close to the top there. And by default, Windows 11, this is off. I don't want to turn this off now because I'm using all these phones. But what that means is when this is off, none of this stuff works.
Paul Thurrott [00:02:38]:
So there's not going to be— well, the Phone Link app is still there, but it wouldn't do anything. You don't get these OS integration features we'll look at in a moment. So you have to enable that, although if you go through the Phone Link wizard, it will enable that for you. So you don't have to worry in that case. Each time you add a device, it will show up here. So I've added 3. So I've got the iPhone here, Pixel 10, which is your basic Android phone, and then this is my wife's old Samsung phone, which has additional functionality. So you can see a little bit of status information in each.
Paul Thurrott [00:03:09]:
There's a couple of cross-device capabilities listed here, which are very interesting. These work with all kind of 3 experiences, if that makes sense. App Resume. This is— this comes up very infrequently, but with certain apps you can begin an activity on a phone. So maybe you're listening to a Spotify playlist, would be a good example, and you come to your computer and you want to come— you want to continue it there. In other words, you want to bring it from the phone and put it onto the computer. Now in this case, you would have to have the Spotify app installed, but assuming it's the same account and so forth, you could bring— you could just bring it over. So when you go to your Windows 11 computer, you see a Spotify icon down here and it would say, do you want to continue? Yes.
Paul Thurrott [00:03:50]:
And then it just brings whatever you're doing into that app instead, which is pretty cool. I went the wrong way there. Um, and then Start. And so this just brings— this is the Start settings, right? So this is the Start menu, but this is the option here that matters. And there's nothing really down here. I'm not sure why that even expands, but when this is on, when you open the Start menu you get this mobile devices slice over in the corner. And so what you see here will vary by device, frankly, because there are different capabilities, but you get some status information. You can click into those experiences on the device.
Paul Thurrott [00:04:24]:
Actually, these 2 are on the device. If I want to send a file to the device, I can click this and it brings up this little window, which is kind of cool. I think we would have talked about this before, but you can kind of toggle that on or off and you get recent, notifications as well. So nice, that's fine. And then when we go back to that mobile devices page, you will see device-specific options as well. So you click into the iPhone and there's basically nothing, right? It's on or it's off. I mean, there's really— this is the way the iPhone works. There's not much you can do about it.
Paul Thurrott [00:04:59]:
Click into a Pixel 10 Pro XL, in this case, basically any normal Android phone, and you get a lot of stuff. So if I open File Explorer, for example, you can see I have that phone right here out above everything else. It's just available so you can quickly browse the file system. Now you can plug your phone in and browse the file system if you know how to do that, but this works wirelessly. So even though this thing is not connected with a cable, I can actually just go into this device and copy files back and forth, which is really cool. You can only have one of your phones in File Explorer. So if I turn that off and open the that again. It's just— it's still there actually, but it should be gone.
Paul Thurrott [00:05:35]:
But oh, there we go. Okay, it took a second. Um, so I'll go back. Yeah, you can see it's gone. Um, and I think for connected camera, you can probably have multiple phones, but this is the ability to use your phone's cameras, which are probably way better than your computer camera, as a webcam. And you can switch between the front and the back and so forth. That's good. Cross-device clipboard, copy information on your PC, paste it into the phone.
Paul Thurrott [00:06:00]:
Nice. Um, this is— remote control sounds better than it is. This is just the ability from your phone to lock this, lock your computer. It's not particularly useful, but, um, I, I'm guessing this is, um, gonna— they're gonna add to this over time, add more functionality to that. This ensures that it appears in Windows Share. So if I go into here and I want to share this thing which is an image, you can see that the phones appear here, and that's because that option is checked, right? And so I could just share directly this way instead of doing a manual file copy, which is pretty, pretty good. And, uh, new photo, um, notifications. Let me minimize everything.
Paul Thurrott [00:06:41]:
I'll take a picture, and then we should eventually Dun dun dun. See there? Oh well, it's not available here out of the blue at some point, but you'll get a notification banner notification down in the corner. And the point of that is that you might want to just click on it and then you can edit it or do whatever you want to do with it, share. So as you take pictures with the phone, they kind of appear on screen. When we move over to the Samsung phone, there will be Actually, these are the same options. So actually we see the same options here, but in, um, in the Phone Link app you'll see more. All right, so we'll look at that now. All right, so back to Phone Link.
Paul Thurrott [00:07:26]:
So, you know, the basic experience here, um, we have, uh, the text messages I've sent recently. Um, I can create a new text message. It's an iPhone, so I only get— I can do emoji if I want to. I'm not going to do that there, obviously, but, um, but if I select this and I can bring up this emoji thing and then say, you know, I want to send some cute little graphics here. I'm not sending it to anybody, but you get the idea there. Um, let me delete that. And then the call one, because this is an iPhone, this is 99% spam. So none of these, you can, you know, if you want to call any of these numbers, please do.
Paul Thurrott [00:08:02]:
Um, uh, except for this one, which is a doctor, but these are just, these are just spam calls that I, the iPhone filters them out of the main view. The Phone Link app does not. It's kind of bizarre. But, um, you know, when you receive a phone call, um, you can answer it on the computer, right? And so there'll be a window, um, you know, use the microphone that you have, the speakers you have, whatever. You can transfer it to the phone, etc. You can start a call from here and all that kind of stuff. So it's all the stuff you would expect. You get different options with these notifications.
Paul Thurrott [00:08:33]:
On the iPhone, you don't really get much of anything, frankly, but You get these basic options. If you— if this is an important notification, I could pin that and it will always appear at the top until I get rid of it. You can pin multiple notifications. I can just clear— I clear this one— individual notifications, right? I could clear all of them at one time too, except for the one that's pinned, right? Because it's pinned. But I can, I can still kill that manually. And for the iPhone, that's pretty much it, right? This little header area lets you switch between phones. You can do that in Settings too, but obviously this is faster. So when I go over to a Pixel phone, Benito's telling me his internet died.
Paul Thurrott [00:09:10]:
That's funny. So I can close that. But you see the notifications that are on that device. You also see additional controls, right, for audio player, although this actually does appear on the iPhone if you are playing audio, the ability to mute the volume. It is in Do Not Disturb mode right now, but you can toggle that on and off. And I can buzz the phone if I don't, you know, where's the phone, it will make a sound and I can go find it, that kind of thing. Um, the messages and call stuff is, uh, roughly the same with the exception that I don't have any messages. I'm not actively using this phone right now, but you get these additional capabilities down here for whether you're replying to or sending a message.
Paul Thurrott [00:09:47]:
So you can attach an image, which you cannot do on the iPhone. You can also attach a video clip, by the way, but they have to be relatively small. And then you can insert a GIF. And these are Like emoji, but bigger, right? There's also this Photos interface, although as this thing says, this is going away. And the reason is they're going to change the way that photo integration works. So I'm kind of hoping that that banner notification sticks around. This thing did not appear with the iPhone, but if you open the Photos app and open it on the right screen— You can see if you go through here, if you have an iPhone, you can connect your iCloud account. So if you're backing up to iCloud, you'll see all your iPhone photos there.
Paul Thurrott [00:10:35]:
That's the way to do that. And oh, I'm on the iPhone. That's what— did I— am I on the iPhone? Oh, it didn't switch over. But normally what you get here is— oh, that's because this— the iPhone is actually physically connected. That's why that's doing that. But you can, you can tab through here into all of your phones. So you can, you can just view the photos that are on any phone from here. Or the— Yeah, the photos that are on any phone from here.
Paul Thurrott [00:10:56]:
So the Photos app is becoming the place for that stuff. So they're telling you this, it's still there for now, but this is a capability that is going to go away soon. You also get this What's New screen. I don't know why iPhone doesn't get this, but the iPhone is limited to this keyboard shortcut screen, which just gives you some common keyboard shortcuts to use. Now, if we go over to the best phone, at least from the perspective of this thing, Um, she's not using this, so there's a lot of this, like, things that are logged out and whatever. These are the types of things. But, um, a couple of slightly different modes you can, you know, switch between, like vibrate mode and, um, whether there are sounds, etc., instead of just mute, uh, on and off, etc. The audio player is still there.
Paul Thurrott [00:11:40]:
You can still sound this, uh, send the sound. Um, you can see the background image from her, um, home screen is, is behind there. And that would have been true of the Pixel too, actually. Not the iPhone, because God forbid. But yeah, you can vaguely see it there. But you do get that background effect. And it has the same options, but they also have the app options. So there's a couple things here.
Paul Thurrott [00:12:05]:
But real quick too, I will say instant hotspot. So I've already enabled this. But what that does is when you go down to the quick settings and you click here, that Hotspot is right there at the top. So if we were out in the world, maybe this public Wi-Fi, whatever it is, I'm not connected to a Wi-Fi network like I am now. I could just click to this and I don't have to type passwords. It just connects to it automatically. So that's something you have to approve once on the phone. Now you have this connection.
Paul Thurrott [00:12:32]:
This is just a simpler way to do this. Obviously, you could connect to your phone's connection however you want to do that. I mean, there's different ways to do it, but this is just a more seamless way to do that. 2 basic things here. You can open the whole phone screen so you get the phone itself in a window on screen like an app, or you can open individual apps, right? So you can see all the apps on the phone. Some apps you mark as favorite. Like if I go to this thing and say, well, I want— this is a favorite, I always want it to be near the top. It lists the most recent apps that we use there.
Paul Thurrott [00:13:03]:
So I'll just open the screen. This will do the phone. Now it might need me. Yeah, so I have to unlock the device. Odd that my finger does not work on my wife's phone. Okay. All right. So this is not a touchscreen.
Paul Thurrott [00:13:19]:
If it was, you could touch the screen just like you do your phone and it would work fine. Let's minimize this. This thing is resizable. Um, you know, it keeps the aspect ratio, you know, of course. Um, and you can launch individual apps. And I'm trying to think of something that's not too damaging here to open, like Chrome or whatever. Um, you can use your mouse like your finger. So I'm dragging up, so it's kind of like doing that, uh, gesture on the phone.
Paul Thurrott [00:13:45]:
Uh, you do it from the top. Sorry. Yeah, you do it from the top. Um, you'll see the notification shade, etc. Um, but I actually think that running individual apps is kind of more interesting in a way, and there's a couple reasons. Um, this one opened pretty big, right? So this is an expanded view, and I think something— I don't want to open that one on here, but, um, Let me see what this one does. Yeah, so this one opens in a normal aspect ratio, right? So 2 different apps, 2 different kind of experiences. You can actually, if it's supported by the app, which on Android most do, you can expand it.
Paul Thurrott [00:14:17]:
So I could go here and it doesn't do anything. So this— oh no, there it goes. So what you're seeing is kind of the experience you would have on a tablet, right? You're getting more of a full-screen experience. I don't know, let me see if I can resize this thing arbitrarily. It's kind of a little touchy here, but I think I can. Okay, well, Oh, there we go. Oh, I see. Okay, so it's keeping the aspect ratio.
Paul Thurrott [00:14:38]:
I don't actually get to turn this into a 4:3 window or whatever, but that's fine. You still get this more kind of immersive experience if you want. If depending on the app, it may only support this phone aspect ratio, or you may just, you know, prefer that, right? Close these 2 things. And then the only other thing that's kind of of interest— there's actually different ways to do this. Um, but if I bring up a compatible app and there aren't many, but I know one of them is the Samsung My Files app. Uh, da da da da da. So run that. It runs in that phone aspect ratio, which is whatever.
Paul Thurrott [00:15:13]:
Um, you should be able to drag files back and forth between the devices this way. Now this is, again, this is not the only way to do it. You could have it over here. It could be part of File Explorer, et cetera. But it is another way. And this is unique, I think, to select Android phones, but it's definitely unique to Android phones in general. Let me just go to a location like Downloads is a good one. So I could just drag this thing over here and you can see it's got the little icon shift.
Paul Thurrott [00:15:36]:
So, you know, that's going to happen. Let go. It doesn't support it. It actually does support it. But depending on the— yeah, here we go. Now it's actually doing it. So it will— you can drag and drop between the device. If that doesn't work or doesn't make sense to you, again, you can just add it to File Explorer through this interface.
Paul Thurrott [00:15:59]:
Let's see. Yep, I'll make that one available. That will probably take a second, but nope, it's already there. And then you could just browse this storage that way, right? So that's another way to do it. But it said it didn't work, but it did work. I knew it was going to work because that does work. But, um, but kind of a cool Android-only capability, um, that you get with Phone Link, right? So, that's probably most of it. Again, Photos going away, a couple of additional things up here.
Paul Thurrott [00:16:27]:
Even if you have an iPhone, this is useful because you're going to send text messages and receive phone calls or send phone calls. And those are always, for me, especially as you get older, better on a computer, bigger screen, etc., right? So, it's worth it just for that. This is a problem on iPhone. The sync is not automatic. Um, and you refreshing this should honestly— there are no notifications, nothing to do here. It's not going to get rid of that for some reason. But, um, you can make a configuration change to make this a little bit better. But in many cases with texting especially, you have to kind of go into a message and then it will start to populate.
Paul Thurrott [00:17:02]:
It's not as automatic, you know, as it is on an Android device, but it's still pretty good. Honestly, it's still pretty good. So I think that's most of it. Um, Make sure I haven't missed anything here. Yeah, so you got notifications, messages, calls everywhere. Call messages and calls are better on Android. Uh, Photos is going away, but you can do that through the Photos app, drag and drop, lots of file copy possibilities there. And then if you have a Samsung or whatever recent flagship device, you get those remote app capabilities, which honestly is really cool.
Paul Thurrott [00:17:36]:
You can run those apps side by side with the apps that you have on your PC. So there you go. Hopefully you found this useful. We will have a new episode of Hands on Windows every Thursday. You can find out more about the podcast at twit.tv/how. Thank you so much for watching. Thank you especially to our Club Twit members. We love you guys.
Paul Thurrott [00:17:58]:
We love you guys.
