116 PCWorld DECEMBER 2019HERE’S HOW WINDOWS’ YOUR PHONE APP
Notifications
Likewise, Notifications represent nothing more
than the Android notifications that apps already
send to the home screen of your phone. There’s
not much to do here, although you do have the
option of filtering those notifications so that only
a subset gets passed along to 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
consider the filtering options, as right now
you can see one notification slide in for a
new email on your phone, and another from
the Mail or Outlook app on your PC.Phone screen
This is one of the more interesting value-
added features of Your Phone: the ability toaccess your phone’s home screen, and by
proxy, access any Android apps that may
be on it. Overall it might be more
convenient just to simply haul out your
phone. On the other hand, if doing so
would be rude, Your Phone is a convenient
way to access it surreptitiously.
Because you’re interacting with your
phone over a Bluetooth connection, you’ll
notice some lag. (As a test, I tried a couple of
games over the Your Phone connection;
something like Angry Birds is playable, but
an action game is not.) Remember that you
can’t easily lower your phone’s volume
without physically interacting with it, so
you’ll have to dive into the phone’s settings
menu to adjust it.
If there’s an Android app that you need
to access surreptitiously, with no Windows
or web counterpart available, the phone
screen feature can be handy.Calls
With the recently announced Calls, Your
Phone finally becomes...a phone. Make sure
that you enable your phone to share its
contact list with Windows. Calls doesn’t
appear to access the Windows 10 People
app or Outlook, which is where Windows
would store that contact information.
Calls allows you to use your laptop’s
speaker and mic to talk to callers, which of
course is anything but discreet. On the other
hand, if you’re working in a private office,You can adjust the amount of notifications by
limiting which apps can send them to you.