Microsoft is bringing my favorite iPhone and Mac feature to Windows 10
It's incredible how quickly the tide can turn on the internet. It seems like just yesterday that hordes of angry Windows users were banding together and vowing in unison that they would never patronize Microsoft again because of its shoddy Windows 8 platform. Now, it's almost as though Windows 8 never existed — apparently skipping 9 and jumping directly to 10 worked pretty well indeed.
But Windows 10 isn't just a marketing trick, it's a well-crafted desktop platform that doesn't overcompensate for Microsoft's shortcomings in mobile, which is why the Windows 8 experience was so terrible. The best part is that Microsoft continues to make important improvements to its Windows 10 platform, and it looks like the next big addition to Windows will be one of my favorite features from iOS and OS X.
DON'T MISS: My iPhone screen is bigger than your HDTV, but it still fits in my pocket
Desktop and smartphone user experiences were entirely separate for a period of time, but Apple and Google have made great strides to better link them. Email protocols like Exchange and IMAP allowed changes made on one device to be reflected on the other, so why couldn't this same concept extend to other areas as well?
Apple's Handoff feature suite was introduced as a way to make that happen. Using Handoff, users can switch seamlessly from an iPhone to a MacBook to an iPad without skipping a beat. Web pages you were browsing on your iPhone are instantly available on your MacBook. Documents you were editing on your MacBook open in the blink of an eye on your iPad.
Now, it looks like Microsoft is getting ready to bake a similar feature set into Windows 10.
As noted by a user on Reddit, a new option appeared for some users in the latest Windows 10 update that refers to Microsoft's upcoming handoff feature. It's not yet fully implemented so it cannot be tested, but this falls in line with earlier reports suggesting that Microsoft is working on functionality similar to handoff.
It's important to note that this functionality, once launched, will not be limited to users with Windows smartphones. As reiterated by MSpoweruser, the handoff feature in Windows 10 will be cloud based and will work with third-party apps on the iOS and Android platforms.
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