One of Windows 10’s best features is about to get much better
Your Phone messaging has a handy Picture-in-Picture mode in the pipeline
When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
Microsoftcontinues to beaver away at theYour Phone app, which hooks up your smartphone with yourWindows 10PC, and the next new feature in the pipeline is reportedly Picture-in-Picture support for messaging.
Note that this feature is still in early development, and hasn’t yet reached the stage of being tested by Windows Insiders yet to get feedback on it, but hopefully that should happen soon enough.
At any rate,Windows Latesthighlighted the incoming ability, with Picture-in-Picture allowing the user to take a chat from the Your Phone app, and split it off into a separate resizable window.
The idea being that if you’re carrying out an important conversation, and still want to keep tabs on it while working on something else on the desktop, you can do just that when the chat has been split into its own little window away from the main application.
Picture perfect
That’s pretty handy indeed, and another nifty feature that might come in useful (although probably not as often) is a ‘Copy Text from Picture’ ability. As the name suggests, this lets you take an image and have any text automatically copied out of it, so you can paste the text into a message or wherever you want.
Just like Picture-in-Picture, this functionality still hasn’t moved to the stage where it’s being tested by Windows Insiders, but with any luck it should do soon. From there, assuming that testing goes well and the feature is worthwhile, it’ll eventually appear in the release version of the Your Phone app.
Your Phone has other cool features in the pipeline, like the ability tosee the music currently playing on your phone(and any relevant album artwork). Its main functionality, however, remains to allow you to send (and receive) texts and phone calls direct from yourWindows 10PC, and to mirror your phone screen to the computer (but only with certainSamsungGalaxy handsets in the latter case).
Get the best Black Friday deals direct to your inbox, plus news, reviews, and more.
Sign up to be the first to know about unmissable Black Friday deals on top tech, plus get all your favorite TechRadar content.
Darren is a freelancer writing news and features for TechRadar (and occasionally T3) across a broad range of computing topics including CPUs, GPUs, various other hardware, VPNs, antivirus and more. He has written about tech for the best part of three decades, and writes books in his spare time (his debut novel - ‘I Know What You Did Last Supper’ - was published by Hachette UK in 2013).
Windows 11’s Paint and Notepad apps are getting smart new AI features – though one of the best will be for Copilot+ PCs only
Windows 11 24H2 misery continues, as Microsoft’s buggy update is now breaking printers – especially on Copilot+ PCs
Another reason to avoid edge-lit 4K TVs: they may fail faster than others, according to this report
