The Windows 10 Insider Builds - which are just betas for Windows - are quickly starting to pick up traction, thanks in part to their new feature which allows you to connect your phone to your PC in new ways. The "Your Phone" app, which we saw for the first time back in May of last year, recently added screen mirroring support. Screen mirroring allows you to control your Android device from your PC via Bluetooth. You can run Android apps, and essentially do anything you could normally do on your phone, but via your PC. While the feature was pretty buggy and somewhat lacking in features, it was cool to see something like that being natively integrated into Windows.

Now, Microsoft has taken another step towards complete synchronization by adding notification syncing. Vishnu Nath, director of program management at Microsoft Mobile eXperiences, showed off the new feature in a tweet. In the picture, we can see the regular Android notification features: app badge, name, time, and a preview of the message. The feature appears to be built into its own panel on the Your Phone app, on the right-hand side; much the same as regular Windows notifications. Disappointingly, we don't get to see if the notifications can be made to show up in the regular Windows notifications side panel, though we do get to choose which apps to sync notifications from as an option in the Your Phone app. Although, you can't reply to your notifications yet so you'll need to pull out your phone to respond to some messages still.

Nath goes on to say that they are issuing a staged roll-out of the feature, so it's possible that you may not get it right away. The feature requires your phone to be connected to Wi-Fi, too. If you're not already a Windows Insider and would like to join the program, you can do so here. Be warned, however, that the Insider builds can be somewhat unstable, and are not something you should run on your work PC or anything like that. Furthermore, the "Your Phone" app is extremely limited at the moment. The screen mirroring feature only works with the Samsung Galaxy S8, Galaxy S8+, Galaxy S9, and Galaxy S9+. It's not clear at the moment which devices will work with this feature, but Nath says the company is "working to bring this out more broadly."

Link to Windows Developer: Microsoft Corporation
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