The Windows 10 October 2018 Update (1809): Let's Try This Again
by Brett Howse on November 14, 2018 8:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Software
- Operating Systems
- Windows
- Microsoft
- Windows 10
Your Phone
Arguably the headline feature for this update is a new app called Your Phone, which allows you to link your PC with your Android handset to integrate some of the functionality. As a first release, the Your Phone link is limited to photos and SMS messages only, although both of these are very welcome additions to the PC.
With Your Phone, you can access the previous 25 photos on your phone, which makes it handy for when you grab a quick shot of something and need to share it on your PC, but with only access to 25 photos, it’s not going to replace true file and photo sharing apps on your phone like Microsoft’s OneDrive, or Google Photos.
Once you link your phone with your PC, you simply open Your Phone and select Photos, and you’ll have access to the full resolution images just as if you were working on your phone. It works with screenshots as well, so there are times where this will be very handy.
The other functionality is the ability to send and receive SMS messages from your PC, which is something that Windows Phone was able to do, but with its demise, Microsoft needs to leverage Android for this. At the moment, iOS users won’t be able to sync iMessage with the PC, and it’s unclear whether Apple will ever allow this outside of their ecosystem.
As with Photos, once you pair your phone, the previous month’s worth of SMS messages will appear on your PC, and you can send new SMS messages or continue your current conversations. There’s going to be a bit of a delay when sending and receiving messages, since your Android phone will need to be the relay, but it works well and is something that most users should appreciate.
Microsoft has hinted at additional features coming in future updates, such as the ability to mirror calls on the PC, and Your Phone should be a nice space to watch with the importance of the phone in most people’s lives.
In addition, if you’ve installed the Microsoft Launcher on Android, it will link with the Timeline feature introduced in the April 2018 update allowing you to quickly get back to where you were on multiple devices.
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Makaveli - Thursday, November 15, 2018 - link
Maybe not. So my Laptop is fine but my Desktop will freeze after installing the update at the windows logo. Rebooting the machine reverts back to 1709 so still a problem here.automator_devops - Friday, November 16, 2018 - link
Funny you should mention dark mode... when will this site get one?0ldman79 - Saturday, November 17, 2018 - link
To be fair, I had issues on 4 out of 5 machines with 1607 and 1709.I ran fast track updates to get off of those builds as quickly as possible on my laptop and rolled back my desktops and prevented those updates all together.
Microsoft's track record is not as good as it would appear on the surface. We had a lot of customers roll through the shop with similar problems. 1709 was buggy as hell until several updates came through almost two months later.
printersupportcare - Monday, November 19, 2018 - link
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thetuna - Tuesday, December 4, 2018 - link
"hopefully this fixes the long-standing bug with Windows 10 where it wouldn’t always copy when you do Ctrl C"So it's not just me!
I thought I was going insane...
HikariWS - Friday, December 7, 2018 - link
Marketing Win10 as a service is really hurting us customers.By that M$ claims that we're not buying the licence to use the software, but we're buying the service of a operating system and M$ is allowing us to install the software so they can provide that service.
This slight change makes M$ force us to update Win10 even if we don't wanna, so that they keep providing the service.
In my home server, Win10 was working fine, until I was forced to update it to 1709. Now I have a huge memory leak issue that makes Win10 crash in less then 24, unless I reboot it, every day. I can't just restore its backup, because it just forces me to restart and it updates itself again.
We'd expect that this new update method, even more by merging all patches on a monthly update, would make Win10 more stable and the update more reliable. But what we see is exactly the opposite. Ever since Win98 I don't have OS memory leaks and don't need to reboot a PC on a daily manner.