How come Microsoft want the Windows 10 Your Phone app? Since it preserves the most crucial functions of a phone: access for your photos, messages, notifications, calls, and even your phone's home screen-without the need to remove your phone out of your pocket.

That might sound ridiculous, but think again: Once you pull your phone from your pocket, you're instantly lost in messages, email, Instagram-all of those distracting from your focus and flow while caring for your PC. Theoretically, you can refuse to open Outlook on your PC and use your phone instead. But you don't, right? Since the PC is a lot more convenient-and, in a few instances, having fun with your phone is also quite rude.

Your Phone's functionality is essentially complete, however the landing's been a little rough. You'll have to combine the best PC and phone hardware to obtain the most of Your Phone, but the best basic features already are available to the planet at large. We are able to also show you how exactly what the final vision appears like, and just what (if anything!) you'll want to get there. Your Phone is surprisingly simple and effective, and it's much further along than during our start looking at the Your Phone experience.

Setup: What you'll need

Due to the "walled garden" approach Apple takes with iOS, Your Phone is essentially associated with Android. (Though Your Phone technically supports iPhones, Microsoft has stopped listing them among supported phones.) Even so, its not all phone supports every Your Phone function at this time. You'll get the best experience at this time with a Samsung Galaxy or OnePlus phone.

Any recent Android phone should be able to connect to Your Phone and receive Your Phone's basic functions: photos, SMS texts, and notifications. The newer, more complex functions-placing calls and interacting with the phone's home screen-are restricted to a smaller subset of devices (Galaxy Phones and up to date OnePlus phones, basically). Unfortunately, Your Phone can link simply to just one phone right now.

Here's a more detailed list of the hardware and software requirements for every Your Phone function, at the moment:

Photos, messages, and notifications:

A Windows 10 PC running the Windows 10 April 2018 Update or later, and an Android phone running Android 7.0 or later.

Telephone calls (Calls) out of your PC:

A Windows 10 PC with build 18362.356 or newer, as well as an Android phone running Android 7.0 or later.

Getting together with your phone's screen (Phone screen) from your PC:

A Windows 10 Insider PC supporting Low Energy Peripheral Mode, including Surface Laptop 2, Surface Pro 4-6, Surface Book 1-2, and Surface Go. A list of supported phones is here, with many Samsung Galaxy and recent OnePlus devices supported.

Generally, I've had the very best luck with Calls and make contact with Screen while running the most recent Windows 10 Insider Fast Ring previews, which are optimized for that latest iteration of the Phone. But the basic functions (texts, photos, and notifications) should work fine having a regularly-updated Windows 10 PC. Remember, this should all open up to some wider subset of devices over time.

How to set up Your Phone in your smartphone

While the Your Phone app should be pre-loaded or automatically downloaded on most PCs, you'll need to download the companion app for your phone, known as the Your Phone Companion. The Your Phone Companion for Android can either be downloaded via the link, or enter your phone number in to the Your Phone app on Windows. Microsoft will send a text for your phone with the download link within it.

Observe that you'll need to setup Your Phone Companion on the telephone as well as Your Phone on the PC at basically the same time, ensuring your phone and PC are up to date, activating Bluetooth on both devices, and launching both apps. You'll quickly move through a short number of steps that will enable your phone as well as your PC for connecting.

Setup needs a decent amount of backwards and forwards, and that there can be some fiddling that needs to be done. Setup will probably make sure that Bluetooth is on on both devices, although not always. The setup process will also probably pair both devices for you, however when I switched test phones I needed to perform these steps manually. Make certain both devices are on the same Wi-Fi network for easier communication. And when it's finally ready to go, you'll probably need to approve separate Your Phone Companion permissions for texting, then calls, then notifications, and so forth; It's a hassle, but the permissions are there to make sure apps don't abuse your privacy.

Don't be switched off through the apparent complexity. We've detailed a lot of the steps that Windows must take proper care of behind the scenes, and some of this is just stepping through the normal privacy approvals.

How to use Your Phone

Once setup is completed, it's time to actually make use of your Phone. Here's quick tips towards the particulars of each one of the apps.

One potential gotcha is due to your smartphone's onscreen keyboard. Your Phone is made to allow you to access your phone out of your PC, using your physical keyboard for connecting to it and react to messages. I had been shocked to discover that when I acquired my phone (by habit) to reply to a text, the onscreen keyboard had disappeared. In the event that happens, try searching for the "keyboard" in the Android Settings menu in your phone, after which be sure that there's a choice to enable the on-screen keyboard even when your computer is doing the typing. That will allow you the freedom to apply your phone as you'd like, even if it's connected to the PC.

Remember to check the Your Phone app's Settings gear at the bottom left-hand corner, where there are options, for instance, to permit SMS texts although not MMS pictures.

Photos

Your Phone's Photos tab is similar to the Photos app within Windows: if you take a photograph with your phone, Your Phone's Photos causes it to be open to you for sharing or editing. You'll visit a matrix of up to 25 photos and screenshots inside the Your Phone Photos tab, which you'll copy, share, or save from inside the tab. Frustratingly, you can't directly edit them using Photos if you don't save them to your hard drive, then edit all of them with Photos.

Messages

In this context, "Messages" is just shorthand for SMS/MMS text messages, not any specific app on Android or anywhere else. As a result, it's a bare-bones summary of the text messages you and your contacts have exchanged, nothing more. Most messaging apps, including Skype, provide a "call" option, and usually a video-chat option as well. Messages does neither, even though you could argue again the bare-bones approach is necessary to keep flow.

The Settings choice to download images sent via MMS texts automatically needs some clarity. For one, when I specifically toggled it on, an evaluation photo delivered to me via text didn't save to my PC-though my phone isn't configured to automatically save photos delivered to my phone. (The photo appeared inline like a text message, though, because it should have.) It might also be useful to know exactly where MMS images are saved, and when they're automatically backed up to OneDrive. This is why people use Snapchat, after all.

Unfortunately, Messages still shows any message threads that you've archived on your phone, including automated texts of one-time passwords that a web service may give back for two-factor authentication. (Remember that it's safer to use an authenticator app for 2FA instead.)

Notifications

Likewise, Notifications represent nothing more than the Android notifications that apps already send to the home screen of your phone. There's very little to complete here, even though you do have the option of filtering those notifications to ensure that merely a subset gets passed along for your PC.

Like notifications of new email, those slide in from the bottom right and reside in your Action Center. That's reason enough to think about the filtering options, as at this time you can observe one notification slide in for a brand new email on your phone, and the other in the Mail or Outlook app on your PC.

Phone screen

This is one of the more interesting value-added features of Your Phone: the opportunity to access your phone's home screen, and by proxy, access any Android apps which may be on it. Overall it might be more convenient just to simply haul out your phone. However, if doing this could be rude, Your Phone is really a convenient way to access it surreptitiously.

Because you're interacting with your phone on the Bluetooth connection, you'll notice some lag. (Like a test, I attempted a couple of games over the Your Phone connection; something like Angry Birds is playable, but an action game is not.) Keep in mind that you can't easily decrease your phone's volume without physically getting together with it, so you'll need to dive into the phone's settings menu to adjust it.

If there's an Android app you need to access surreptitiously, without any Windows or web counterpart available, the telephone screen feature can be handy.

Calls

Using the recently announced Calls, Your Phone finally becomes...a telephone. Ensure that you enable your phone to talk about its contact list with Windows. Calls doesn't seem to access the Windows 10 People app or Outlook, which is where Windows would store that contact details.

Calls enables you to make use of your laptop's speaker and mic to speak to callers, which obviously is anything but discreet. However, if you're your private office, you don't need to unearth your phone to answer or place a phone call.

Assuming you've never used Skype before, it may be rather fun to put and react to a phone call out of your PC. I did watch a little bit of an echo or "tunnel" effect when answering callers, though which may be patched out over time.

Same with Your Phone ultimately useful? It may be, meaning that the Android watch or Apple Watch enables you to surreptitiously glance at your wrist-or in this instance, your screen-to see what your phone is reporting. A wearable does much more-but that's one more tool and one more cost.

Fortunately, the standard functions are probably the best: the ability to see and respond to texts and notifications, in addition to grab a photo out of your phone and employ it quickly within a Windows application. Those Your Phone features are available now, using a broad range of phones and PCs. They're worth trying out.