Hands-On Windows 205: Unlocking Phone Link in Windows 11

0:00Coming up next on Hands on Windows, we're going to take a look at phone link, which is, I mean, are inarguably one of the more complicated apps in Windows 11. This episode is brought to you by OutSystems, the leading Agenic Systems platform. OutSystems is helping their customers modernize operations by enabling them to build, modernize, and operate enterprise systems, starting from any coding tool in a governed, agentic, engineering model. Without systems, you can coordinate and govern your entire agentic workforce within your enterprise ecosystem and accelerate impact with industry-proven, agentic solutions that are pre-built, governed, and customizable to your business. It's time to innovate at the speed of AI without compromising quality or control, which is why thousands of enterprises worldwide trust out systems for their mission-critical apps. Teams of any size and technical depth can use OutSystems to build, deploy, and manage AI apps and agents quickly and cost-effectively without compromising reliability and security. Without systems, you can accelerate

1:05ideas from concept to completion. It's the leading agentic systems platform that is unified, agile, and enterprise-proven, allowing you to build your agentic future with AI solutions deeply integrated into your architecture. OutSystems build your agentic future. Learn more at voutsystems.com slashtwit. That's outsystems.com slashtwit. Podcasts You Love From People You Trust This is Twit Hello everybody and welcome back to Hands on Windows on Paul Throat. This week we are going to take 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. 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

2:06at here on the screen right now. You can see notifications, you can see messages, this calls, etc. 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. For example, there's more things you can do within text messaging on an Android phone, etc. But there's also other things related to phone capabilities and so forth. We'll look at that in a moment. 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. A lot of 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, you can have multiple apps also in their own remote windows. Then an instant hot spot feature which connects you more quickly and seamlessly to the mobile connection on your phone if that's what you want to do. The other main thing to know going into this is that you have to use a Microsoft

3:07account with this. There's no way around that. If you sign in with a local account or you're signing with a Microsoft worker 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 sink across the internet to multiple computers, multiple phones, etc. There are two main interfaces to this. I'm not going to go through the set of processes. It's unbelievably complicated. Of course, I've already set up all three of the phones. I want to show you today. Normally, you would start from this interface, which would be empty. You don't have a phone and then there's a QR code, 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. If you go into Bluetooth and devices, you'll see mobile devices is pretty close to the top there. By default, Windows 11, this is off. I don't want to turn this off now because I'm using all these phones. What that means is when this is off, none of this stuff works. 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. You have to enable that. Although if you go through the phone link wizard,

4:11it will enable that for you. You don't have to worry in that case. Each time you add a device, it will show up here. I've added three. I've got the iPhone here, Pixel 10, which is your basic Android phone. This is my wife's old Samsung phone, which has additional functionality. You can see a little bit of status information in each. There's a couple of cross-device capabilities listed here, which are very interesting. These work with all three experiences. That makes sense. App resume, this comes up very infrequently, but with certain apps, you can begin an activity on a phone. Maybe you're listening to a Spotify playlist. It would be a good example. You come to your computer and you want to continue it there. In other words, you want to bring it from the phone and put it on to the computer. In this case, you would have to have the Spotify app installed, but assuming it's the same account and so forth, you could just bring it over. When you go to your Windows 11 computer, you see a Spotify icon down here. It would say, do you want to continue?

5:11Yes. It just brings whatever you're doing into that app instead, which is pretty cool. I went the wrong way there. This is the start settings. This is the start menu, but this is the option here that matters. It's nothing really down here. I'm not sure why that even expands. When this is on, when you open the start menu, you get this mobile devices slice over on the corner. 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, actually, these two 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. Then when we go back to that mobile devices page, you will see device-specific options as well. You click into the iPhone and there's basically

6:13nothing. It's on or it's off. This is the way the iPhone works. There's not much you can do about it. Click into a Pixel 10 Pro Excel disk case, basically any normal Android phone, and you get a lot of stuff. 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. 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. If I turn that off and open that again, it's still there, it should be gone. There it goes. It took a second. I'll go back. You can see it's gone. 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. You can switch between the

7:14front and the back and so forth. That's good. Cross device clipboard, copy information on your PC, paste it into the phone. Nice. This is remote control sounds better than it is. This is just the ability from your phone to lock your computer. It's not particularly useful, but I'm guessing this they're going to add to this over time, add more functionality to that. This ensures that it appears in Windows Share. If I go into here and I want to share this thing, which is an image, you can see that the phones appear here. That's because that option is checked, so I could just share directly this way instead of doing a manual file copy, which is pretty good. New photo notifications will minimize everything. Then we should eventually see there. It's not a bit over here out of the blue,

8:18at some point, but you'll get a notification, banner notification down in the corner. 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 the share. As you take pictures with the phone, they appear on screen. When we move over to the Samsung phone, there will be actually these are the same options. Actually, we see the same options here, but in the phone link app, you'll see more. We'll look at that now. Back to phone links. The basic experience here, we have the text messages I've sent recently. I can credit a new text message. It's an iPhone, so I can do emoji if I want to. I'm not going to do that there, obviously, but if I select this and I can bring up this emoji thing and then say, I want to send some cute little graphics here. I'm not sending it to anybody, but you get the idea there. Let me delete that. Then the call one, because this is an iPhone, this is 99% spam. If you want to call any of these

9:22numbers, please do. Except for this one, which is a doctor. These are just spam calls. The iPhone filters in the amount of the main view. The phone link app does not. It's bizarre. When you receive a phone call, you can answer it on the computer. There will be a window. 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. It's all the stuff you would expect. You get different options with these notifications on the iPhone. You don't really get much of anything, frankly, but you get these basic options. If this is an important notification, I can pin that. It will always appear at the top until I get rid of it. You can pin multiple notifications. I can just 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. I can still kill that manually. For the iPhone, that's pretty much it, right? This little header area lets you switch between phones. You can do that

10:25in settings, too, but obviously this is faster. So when I go over to a pixel phone, Benino is telling me his internet died. 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 an 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. The messages and call stuff is 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 whether you're replying to or sending a message. 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 photo's interface, although as this thing says, this is going away. And the reason is they're going to change

11:30the 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 photo's app and open it on the right screen, you can see, if you go through here, if you have an iPhone, you can connect to your iCloud accounts. If you're backing up to iCloud, you'll see all your iPhone photos there. That's the way to do that. And oh, I'm on the iPhone. That's what did I am 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 tap through here into all of your phones. So you can, you can just view the photos that are on any phone from here. The photos that are on any phone from here. So the photo's 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 is to get this, but the iPhone is

12:33limited 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, she's not using this. There's a lot of this, like things that are logged out, whatever, these are the types of things. But a couple of slightly different modes, you can switch between, like, vibrate mode and whether there are sounds, etc. instead of just mute on and off, etc. The audio player is still there. You can still send the sound. You can see the background image from her home screen is behind there. And that's what I've been through the pixel to 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 these same options, but they also have the app options. So there's a couple of things here, 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 hot spot is

13:37right 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 passwords. It just connects to it automatically. So that's something you have to approve once on the phone. Now you have this connection. This is just a simpler way to do this. Obviously you could connect to your phones 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. This episode of Hands on Windows is brought to you by Threat Locker. Threat actors are using AI now. And you know this. To automate vulnerability discovery, they're modifying scripts on the fly during the attack. They're generating new malware variants. They're coordinating activity across multiple systems. They are evil. And for bad guys' tasks at once took them hours, their days can now happen in minutes. That means you need to defend in real time. And at the same time, organizations are introducing their own AI assistants and agents that can

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16:39voice of the customer for endpoint protection platforms. Rank number one in application control by peer spot. They just won the best zero trust security solutions award at the 2025 TIE awards. AI governance requires more than just an acceptable use policy. Threat Locker gives security teams the technical controls to define which AI tools are approved, who and what can access them and how those tools are allowed to interact with business systems and data. You need to know more. You need to go to Threat Locker.com slash twit. Get a free 30-day trial. You'll learn more about how Threat Locker can help mitigate unknown threats and ensure compliance. Threat Locker.com slash twit. We are so glad to have them as a sponsor. Of course, they took us to black hat. We did win it as weekly down there. Man, we love them. Thank you Threat Locker. Two basic things here. You can open the whole full screen so you get the phone itself in a window on screen like an app or you can open individual apps. You can see all the apps on the phone. Some apps, she markets favorite.

17:43I go to this thing and say, well, this is a favorite. I always want it to be near the top. It lists the most recent apps that we use there. So I'll just open the screen. This will do the phone now. It might need media. 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 touch screen. If it was, you could touch the screen just like you do your phone and it would work fine. I'll just go ahead and ask this thing is resizable. You know, it keeps the aspect ratio, you know, of course. And you can launch individual apps. And I'm trying to think of something that's not too damaging here to open like from whatever. You can use your mouse like your finger. So I'm dragging up. So it's kind of like doing that gesture on the phone. You do it from the top. Yeah, you do it from the top. You'll see the notification shade, et cetera. But I actually think that running individual apps is kind of more interesting in a way. And there's a couple of reasons. This one opened pretty big, right?

18:49So this is an expanded view. And I think something I don't want to open that one on here. But let me see what this one does. Yes. So this one opens in a normal aspect ratio, right? So two different apps, two different kind of experiences. You can actually, if it's supported by the app which on Android most do, you can expand it. So I could go here and do anything. So there 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. Arbitra, it's kind of a little touchy here, but I think I can. Okay. Well, there we go. Oh, I see. Okay. So it's keeping the aspect ratio. I don't actually get to turn this into a four by three 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 two things. And then the only other thing that's kind of of interest is actually different ways to do this. 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.

19:56So run that. It runs in that phone aspect ratio, which is whatever. 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 exports, etc. 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. It's a good one. So I could just drag this thing over here. And you can see it's got the little icon shift. 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 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. Let's see. Yeah, I'll make that one available. It will probably take a second, but no, it's already there. And then you can just browse the storage that way, right? So that's another way to do it. But it said it didn't work, but it did work. I know it was going to work because that

21:00does work, but kind of a cool Android only capability 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. I even if you have an iPhone, this is useful because you're going to send text messages and receive phone calls or spend phone calls. And those are always for me, especially as you get older, better on a computer, bigger screen, et cetera. So it's worth it just for that. This is a problem on iPhone. The sync is not automatic. And 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 you can make a configuration change and 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. 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. Make sure I haven't missed anything here.

22:04Yeah. So you got notifications, messages, calls everywhere, call messages, and calls are better on Android. 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 is honestly really cool. 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 twitter.tv slash H-O-W. Thank you so much for watching. Thank you, especially to our club, to our members. We love you guys. If you are not a member, you can find out more about the program at twitter.tv slash.com for it. Thank you. I'll see you next week. If you like what you heard and you want more of this week's top stories in tech, well subscribe to Tech News Weekly every Thursday I talk with the journalists making and break into tech news.