Your Phone app now makes your PC touchscreen a giant digital art pad for your smartphone

News
By
published

More display real-estate – plus pressure sensitivity for those phone apps which support it

(Image credit: Microsoft)

Microsoft’s Your Phone app for Windows 10 has got a nifty new feature whereby any jottings or drawings done with a stylus – such as the Surface Pen – on the PC’s touchscreen are transferred directly to your smartphone screen.

This represents an expansion of the capabilities of the ‘phone screen’ feature in the Your Phone app, which lets you mirror your smartphone display onto your PC monitor, and interact with it via the mouse and keyboard, or indeed touchscreen.

But now, as Analy Otero Diaz, a Microsoft senior program manager lead, announced on Twitter, support for using a pen on the touchscreen – complete with pressure sensitivity, at least on phone apps that work with this – is now live for Windows testers.

Expanded support

Support for this phone screen mirroring feature was expanded across Microsoft’s various Surface devices in a Windows 10 preview build that was released back in July. Phone screen now works with Microsoft’s Surface Go, Surface Laptop and Surface Laptop 2 along with the Surface Pro 4, 5, and 6, plus the Surface Book and Surface Book 2.

So you can scribble or draw away on the touch displays of these Windows 10 devices, enjoying an expansive amount of real-estate for your digital art pad, with the results then replicated on your phone screen.

On the phone side of the equation, various Samsung Galaxy devices are currently supported – including the Galaxy S8 and onwards, and Galaxy Note 10 – as well as the OnePlus 6 and OnePlus 6T.

As mentioned, this functionality is currently only available to Windows testers, but hopefully it won’t be long before everyone gets to benefit.

Via MS Poweruser

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).