Hands-On Windows 154 transcript

Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show.

Paul Thurrott [00:00:00]:
Coming up next on Hands on Windows, we're going to take a look at how well you can integrate an iPhone with Windows 11. Podcasts you love from people you trust. This is Twit. Hello, everybody, and welcome back to Hands on Windows. I'm Paul Thurat, and this week we're going to look at an unusual combination of technologies. Most people are familiar with the Phonelink app in Windows 11, I assume, and are probably familiar with the fact that it works a lot better with Android, especially if you have a Samsung phone, than it does with an iPhone. But you run a Windows PC, you have an iPhone. What's this experience look like? What do you get as an iPhone user? If you use Windows, it's kind of well understood if you have a Mac, you get all this great integration features, et cetera.

Paul Thurrott [00:00:54]:
We do not get that on Windows. Maybe someday, but right now, a more limited set of integration capabilities. So the most obvious, obviously, as I already mentioned it, is phone Link. And so if you're familiar with the phone link app or if you use the phone link app with an Android phone, this will look a little minimalist. But we don't get all of the features that you see on Android, right? So we have notifications over here. We have a couple of little status updates here. You can refresh if needed. And then you get the two big bucket things, which are messages and calls.

Paul Thurrott [00:01:34]:
And sadly, there are limitations to both, especially to messages, because there's no real way for Microsoft to integrate with imessage. So you lose some capabilities, like group text, for example, come through as individual texts with each of the people in the group, that kind of thing. But, you know, that's the type of thing we've talked about before. Obviously, if you go to a Samsung phone, which I will foolishly try to do here live, you get this better interface with more things going on, like a lot more things, right? So the big ones being remote apps, the whole remote display thing, which we've looked at, and then Photos integration. And the photos integration thing is kind of strange, actually, because you can connect an iPhone to a Windows PC with a USB cable and pull those whatever photos are on there off of the device. So it seems like there should be some way to integrate with the iPhone in that capacity. And there is, actually, I've already installed this. But if you go to the photos app and you haven't configured this yet, you will see this icloud photos link, as I do have here.

Paul Thurrott [00:02:47]:
But it will have, when you click it, it will say, oh, click here to Install this feature, and this feature being icloud. So you get icloud sorry from Microsoft Store as you do other Apple apps, which actually we're going to look at soon. And it's a little convoluted, but once you download, install and configure, which requires two FA through the Apple device, et cetera, et cetera, you get a bunch of new features. The key one to me is this iCloud Photos integration. So this occurs in the Photos app as you're seeing here. So you can just go to this location. So this is whatever apps you have, or, sorry, whatever photos you might have in your iCloud Photos collection, you can view them, you can edit them. So right here, this one's okay.

Paul Thurrott [00:03:36]:
But I could do something like this. Just rotate it in place. You could go right into the editing environment in the Photos app, which is actually pretty extensive now. And if you have a Copilot plus PC like this one, you get more of these kind of AI photo editing features, and these will work right against the photos that are up in icloud. So when you. If I were to make a change here, and I won't, but you could save as a copy or just save once it's changed, and it will actually save back to icloud as well, which is kind of interesting. So that's pretty solid. But I should also just bring up the icloud app, which is, you know, appley and weird.

Paul Thurrott [00:04:17]:
But there's other stuff going on here too, right? So, for example, I have enabled icloud Photos integration. So that happens through Photos, as I showed you, but also through the File Explorer. Right. And so if I go into Pictures here, you'll see there's now an iCloud Photos option. I can go into there, go into Photos, and then this is whatever 32,000 items that I have in my icloud Photos collection. That's crazy. It's also out here in the navigation bar, right along with iCloud Drive, which we'll look at in a second, but same thing. This is the same view.

Paul Thurrott [00:04:52]:
So these are two ways to get to the same place. There's. There's iCloud integration. ICloud drive integration, I should say. When you do that, it's just like anything else. If you had. Well, I do have one drive here. If I had Google Drive, I'm using Synology Drive.

Paul Thurrott [00:05:06]:
And now I can use Cloud Drive. I don't actually use Cloud Drive for documents, but if I did, I could go in here and access those. You can pin those these things to quick access just like you do anything else. And so that gives you a really nice native integration because you can also go in there and you have to go to use more options. But there is a way to use files on demand, so you can peg some of these folders or individual files to always be available. So if your computer's offline, excuse me, you can access those files just like you would with, you know, OneDrive, Google Drive, whatever. There's password and keychain integration support. I don't use Apple passwords and I use keychain because I have to on Apple devices.

Paul Thurrott [00:05:53]:
But this is something I've not enabled. But you could do that as well. So if you're saving passwords, say an Internet Explorer, he almost said in Microsoft Edge it would sync back and forth between the Apple passwords app and the integrated password management feature in that browser. Same thing with bookmarks, but I don't do that. And then it has this little note how you can integrate your Apple Accounts Mail Calendar contacts functionality with the new Outlook. And that I have done that also is a little convoluted. In fact, so much so that I wanted to show you a screenshot of this because it's not obvious when this comes up how you're supposed to do this. So I chose my iCloud account.

Paul Thurrott [00:06:40]:
It says, please create an app password for Outlook on your email provider's site. Huh. So my initial guess was that I would go to iCloud.com and find some something there, because you can access your iCloud email from there. But that's not the case, actually. You have to go to the Apple account website and from there you go into the security section, passwords, bookmarks, etc. And you can create an app password there. So it's account.apple.com, not iCloud.com and once you do that, you'll get a code like an app password, literally, and then you can paste it in and go from there and it will configure Outlook for whatever capabilities that were exposed to that account type. So I set this thing up so that that Apple account was the only account.

Paul Thurrott [00:07:33]:
I don't use it for anything. So there's really no email in here, but you can see this kind of introductory email and you're going to get a subset of the full range of new Outlook features. You could also just, you know, configure Microsoft account, and that would give you more of the capabilities. But it's good for basically, you know, for most of the important Things. And so across contacts and calendar and email, it's actually, it's actually not horrible. So the new Outlook might be horrible, but if you're in Windows and that's what you want to use, so you do have that capability. The other thing you can do as an Apple user, if you're a customer and using their services and things, is you can install some Apple apps. And actually all three of the ones I'm going to show you are new in the sense that the apps themselves have existed for a while, but Apple worked with Microsoft to make these modern versions of the apps that would work in Windows 11.

Paul Thurrott [00:08:34]:
And they do have kind of a nice, a Windows 11 look and feel, if you will, while also retaining kind of the Apple identity. So if I go into Apple music, for example, it looks a lot like it does probably on the Mac or whatever, you get access to all of the playlists and things you've created and you get the whole experience right. So I'm not going to play a song that would probably be a copyright strike of some kind. But you can see it's pretty much the full Apple experience. There's always some minor issues with these kind of Apple Media apps with regards to audio quality, especially as we'll see in Apple TV with video quality as well. But this does do w Atmos, so you do get that kind of, kind of higher quality, potentially music experience. I don't believe it has lossless, but it does at least have Dolby Atmos. So that's pretty good.

Paul Thurrott [00:09:32]:
There's also Apple tv and this is again, some limitations, but it's pretty much the experience you probably know from a Mac or maybe from the Apple TV itself, the Apple TV device. You get the access to all the Apple TV plus content, whatever agreements they have with sports recording this summer. So MLS is here, there are baseball games on Friday nights, et cetera. You can go to the store and you can go to your collection. So if I go to my recent. This is a horrifying collection of content. Content. But the Battlestar Galactica reboot from the early 2000s was on sale, so I bought the whole run of it.

Paul Thurrott [00:10:11]:
And you could go through here and you could download them, which, you know, those are pretty big files, but you could also just stream them, right? And I've said I'm not going to do that. But you wouldn't see it anyway because of the DRM protections. But it's, it's not, you know, you're not going to get 4K HDR, whatever. But it's it's not horrible. The big missing thing here is if you go into any movie that has special features that you would get on an Apple device, like an Apple TV, even an iPhone or whatever, that stuff is not here. And I can't explain that. But the movies are all there and the TV shows and whatever else. So it's close.

Paul Thurrott [00:10:48]:
The final one is kind of a curiosity, but there's an app called Apple Devices and this is the stuff that we used to do in itunes back when that was a thing where you could use itunes to back up your ipod back in the day. Eventually your iPhone, you can use it for things. Well, in the Apple world, they have a way for you to do things like configure a HomePod speaker, et cetera, et cetera. So you can plug any Apple device into your computer over USB that supports that and it will show up here. I'm not going to do that because I did this earlier today and it started a backup of my iPhone, which I do not want. But you can use that if you want to, you know, reset the device, you know, back it up first, get it local, that kind of thing. So this is this plus Apple Music is essentially what itunes used to be, Right. And I guess Apple TV plus or the Apple TV app as well.

Paul Thurrott [00:11:40]:
Those three things combined are sort of the whole experience. So obviously phone link is the big thing day to day. It does give you basic text capabilities. Nice. So you could be on your computer and just type on the real keyboard you have, et cetera. Icloud integration is actually pretty good across the board. Right. Photos integration is really good.

Paul Thurrott [00:11:59]:
File system integration with photos and with Drive with files on demand. That's fantastic. Outlook, you know, if you don't mind using that app, pretty solid experience across email, contacts and calendar and then of course the standalone Apple apps. Right. You don't get a lot of stuff. So you don't get the ability to display your iPhone screen on screen in a window like you would on the Mac soon in Tahoe, or I guess that's available today. You don't get like the phone app like we have, you know, on the Mac. You don't get copy and paste between devices.

Paul Thurrott [00:12:34]:
That's kind of an Apple ecosystem thing, et cetera, et cetera. I'd love to be able to use an iPad as a secondary screen, for example. But I have to say, honestly, I go back and forth between the iPhone and Android and this isn't horrible day to day. This is. This is a lot of. A lot of what most people are going to want most of the time, so it isn't bad. You will have a better experience or maybe a more complete experience on a Mac. But I prefer Windows and I hope you do too, so it's not horrible.

Paul Thurrott [00:13:03]:
All right, well, thank you for watching. Hopefully this was educational to some degree. We'll have a new episode of Hands on Windows every Thursday. You can learn more at Twitter tv. H O W thank you for watching. Thank you especially to our Club Twitt members.