With the arrival of Satya Nadella as head of Microsoft, he decided that the project of becoming an alternative to iOS and Android on a mobile device had ended, completely canceling Windows Phone that had started after the acquisition of the company’s mobile division. Finnish Nokia.
However, that doesn’t mean that smartphones have been completely forgotten. The Mobile Link app, formerly known as Your Phone, arrived alongside Windows 10, an app that allows users to access content stored on their mobile quickly and easily.
As the years have gone by, especially with the launch of Windows 11, this application has received a large number of improvements that offer greater integration of the Windows-Android ecosystem than iOS-macOS, despite being ecosystems developed by two companies. different (Microsoft and Google).
With Mobile Link, in addition to being able to access all the multimedia content stored on an Android mobile, we can also make and receive calls, read and respond to notifications, locate our mobile and even use the device’s cameras as a webcam and all of this completely wireless.
However, for the integration to be perfect, it still needed to be integrated into the system, an integration that was already demonstrated a few days ago by adding the connected mobile to the Share menu and which will be expanded by adding access to the mobile from the Windows Start menu.
Your phone accessible from the Windows Start menu
All the improvements that have been introduced in the Mobile Link application are very good, but it is still necessary to open the application to be able to have at hand all the content stored inside the mobile.
Fortunately, Microsoft has thought the same as millions of other users and, with the launch of the new beta of Windows 11, specifically in build 22635.3790, it is now available in the Start menu, as long as the Mobile Link version is number 1.24052.124.0 or later.
In this way, when you click on the Windows 11 Start menu, in addition to the operating system menu, in the section on the right, an additional panel is displayed showing the mobile phone that we have connected, along with the battery level and access to text messages, calls and photos.
Additionally, the most recent notifications are also displayed at the bottom. As we say, it is a beta version that can still receive improvements as it evolves, so we cannot assume that, in future updates, Microsoft does not include a shortcut to access, for example, all system notifications, not only to the messages and calls we have, information that many users may miss with the current design.
The integration of the Mobile Link application in the Windows Start menu is only available in the Canary version of the Windows 11 Insider channel and will probably arrive together with the big update that will arrive before the end of this year, called 24H2, an update that Microsoft was forced to retire a few weeks ago after a rather rocky launch.
