One of Windows 10’s best features is about to get much better

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Your Phone messaging has a handy Picture-in-Picture mode in the pipeline

(Image credit: Microsoft)

Microsoft continues to beaver away at the Your Phone app, which hooks up your smartphone with your Windows 10 PC, 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 Latest highlighted 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 to see 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 your Windows 10 PC, and to mirror your phone screen to the computer (but only with certain Samsung Galaxy handsets in the latter case).

Darren Allan

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).