Microsoft releases new Windows 10 preview with Your Phone app

Microsoft today released a new preview for PCs with Your Phone app and improvements to Narrator. This build is from the RS5 branch, which represents the Windows 10 update the company plans to release later this year. The company is also releasing builds from the 19H1 branch, which, as its name indicates, will arrive in the first half of next year.

Windows 10 is being developed as a service, meaning it receives new features on a regular basis. Microsoft has released five major updates so far: November Update, Anniversary Update, Creators Update, Fall Creators Update, and April 2018 Update.

The biggest addition in this build is the new Your Phone app, first announced at Microsoft’s Build 2018 developer conference in May. As its name implies, Your Phone’s main purpose is to let you access your phone’s content — like text messages, photos, and notifications — right on your Windows 10 PC.

Your Phone is only going to work with Android devices at first. You’ll be able to snap a picture on your Android phone and see it on your PC — no manual emailing, sending, messaging, uploading, or download required. Your Phone automatically syncs your Android’s most recent photos and lets you drag and drop the ones you need.

In the coming weeks, Windows Insider and Android users will see a desktop pin that takes them directly to the Your Phone app. After you download the app to your mobile phone and follow the setup prompts (Android 7.0 and above required, China is excluded), you will get quicker access to your phone’s content.

Windows Insider and iPhone users will be able to use Your Phone to send webpages instantly to their PCs and pick up where they left off. Using Edge, users will be able to continue reading, watching, or browsing on a bigger screen.

Separately, Microsoft has also made improvements to Narrator, including to reliability (when changing Narrator’s view), Scan Mode (reading, navigating, and selecting text), QuickStart (relaunching and focusing), and Braille (commanding when using the Narrator key). The “Move to beginning of text” keystroke has changed to Narrator + B (was Narrator + Control + B) and the “Move to end of text” keystroke has changed to Narrator + E (was Narrator + Control + E).

This desktop build also includes the following general bug fixes and improvements:

• Fixed the issue resulting in the Clock & Calendar flyout sometimes not appearing until you clicked Start or the Action Center. This same issue impacted both notifications and the taskbar jump lists appearing. Thank you to all the Windows Insiders who gave feedback on this issue.
• Fixed an issue resulting minimized apps having squished thumbnails in Task View.
• Fixed an issue where when open Task View would crash if you pressed Alt+F4 and Timeline was enabled.
• Fixed an issue where Timeline’s scrollbar didn’t work with touch.
• Fixed an issue where the top border of UWP apps would still be accent colored even if having an accent colored border was disabled in Settings.
• Fixed an issue resulting in the tops of apps in tablet mode being clipped (i.e. missing pixels).
• Fixed an issue where the taskbar would stay on top of full-screened apps if you had previously hovered over any grouped taskbar icon to bring up the extended list of previews, but then clicked elsewhere to dismiss it.
• Apps resize better now after monitor DPI changes.
• Fixed an issue where Find on Page in Microsoft Edge would stop working for open PDFs once the PDF had been refreshed.
• Fixed an issue where Ctrl-based keyboard shortcuts (like Ctrl+C, Ctrl+A) didn’t work in editable fields for PDFs opened in Microsoft Edge.
• Fixed an issue where the icons in the Microsoft Edge extension pane were drawing unexpectedly close to the toggles.
• Fixed an issue where the enabled/disabled state of Fast Startup would be reset to default after upgrading. After upgrading off of this build your preferred state will persist.
• Fixed an issue where the Windows Security icon in the taskbar notification area (systray) would become a little bit blurrier every time there was a resolution change.
• Fixed an issue where the USERNAME environment variable was returning SYSTEM when queried from an un-elevated Command Prompt in recent builds.
• Fixed the issue where if the Narrator key is set to just Insert, sending a Narrator command from a braille display should now function as designed regardless if the Caps Lock key is a part of the Narrator key mapping.
• Fixed the issue in Narrator’s automatic dialog reading where the title of the dialog is being spoken more than once.
• Fixed the issue where Narrator won’t read combo boxes until Alt + down arrow is pressed.

Today’s update bumps the Windows 10 build number for the RS5 branch from 17723 (made available to testers on July 25) to build 17728.

This build has 13 known issues:

• You may see some unexpectedly light colors in these surfaces when in dark mode and/or dark on dark text.
• There is an issue impacting WDAG, Remote Desktop and Hyper-V. Remote Desktop Client (mstsc.exe) users will see a misleading error dialog complaining about low virtual memory when a connection is being established. As a workaround, they can ignore that error dialog by just leaving it there. If they dismiss the error dialog, the connection will be severed. And users won’t be able to use enhanced session in Virtual Machine Connection (vmconnect.exe). As a workaround, they can stick with the non-enhanced session.
• When you upgrade to this build you’ll find that the taskbar flyouts (network, volume, etc) no longer have an acrylic background.
• When you use the Ease of Access Make Text bigger setting, you might see text clipping issues, or find that text is not increasing in size everywhere.
• When you set up Microsoft Edge as your kiosk app and configure the start/new tab page URL from assigned access Settings, Microsoft Edge may not get launched with the configured URL. The fix for this issue should be included in the next flight.
• You may see the notification count icon overlapping with the extension icon in the Microsoft Edge toolbar when an extension has unread notifications.
• On Windows 10 in S Mode, launching Office from the Store may fail to launch with an error about a .dll not being designed to run on Windows. The error message is that a .dll “is either not designed to run on Windows or it contains an error. Try installing the program again…” Some people have been able to work around this by uninstalling and reinstalling Office from the Store.
• When using Narrator Scan mode you may experience multiple stops for a single control. An example of this is if you have an image that is also a link.
• When using Narrator Scan mode Shift + Selection commands in Edge, the text does not get selected properly.
• A potential increase in Start reliability and performance issues.
• After setting up a Windows Mixed Reality headset for the first time on this build with motion controllers, the controllers may need to be re-paired a second time before appearing in the headset.
• When using a Windows Mixed Reality immersive app, saying “Flashlight on,” may fail to activate the flashlight feature even though the status appears as active on the Start menu.
• If you install any of the recent builds from the Fast ring and switch to the Slow ring – optional content such as enabling developer mode will fail. You will have to remain in the Fast ring to add/install/enable optional content. This is because optional content will only install on builds approved for specific rings.

As always, don’t install this on your production machine.