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How to connect your phone to your Windows 10 PC

With Fall Creators Update, you can link an iPhone or Android phone to your PC so you can start browsing on your phone and continue on your computer.

Matt Elliott Senior Editor
Matt Elliott is a senior editor at CNET with a focus on laptops and streaming services. Matt has more than 20 years of experience testing and reviewing laptops. He has worked for CNET in New York and San Francisco and now lives in New Hampshire. When he's not writing about laptops, Matt likes to play and watch sports. He loves to play tennis and hates the number of streaming services he has to subscribe to in order to watch the various sports he wants to watch.
Expertise Laptops, desktops, all-in-one PCs, streaming devices, streaming platforms
Matt Elliott
2 min read
Matt Elliott/CNET

Who wants to read an entire long-form article on a tiny phone screen? Windows 10 Fall Creators Update adds a new Phone section to the Settings app that lets you connect your phone to your PC. Once you make the connection, you can then send articles -- long or short -- from your phone to your PC to finish reading at your leisure.

Establish a connection

1. To link your phone, open the Settings app on your computer and click or tap Phone.

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Screenshot by Matt Elliott/CNET

2. Sign in to your Microsoft account if you aren't already and then click Add a phone.

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Screenshot by Matt Elliott/CNET

3. Enter your phone number and click or tap Send.

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Screenshot by Matt Elliott/CNET

4. You might rightly expect to receive a confirmation code texted to your phone to make the connection, but Microsoft throws you a curveball and instead sends you a link to install Edge. To establish the link between phone and PC, you will need to install Edge and then sign into your Microsoft account.

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Screenshot by Matt Elliott/CNET

5. Restart your PC and you'll see your phone listed on the Phone page in Settings, showing you that it's linked.

Share links 

When browsing on Edge on your phone, tap the share button in the center of the bottom menu bar. You'll see the Device name of your PC listed. Tap that and you'll immediately open a new tab in Edge on your PC. Unfortunately, the article you are reading doesn't open in the spot on the page where you left off but at the beginning.

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Screenshot by Matt Elliott/CNET

The other option on the share menu is Continue later. Tap that and it'll send a notification to your PC as a helpful reminder to read later.

Click or tap the icon in the lower-right corner of your computer to open the Windows notification center. It will have a section titled Continue from your phone with your links to read later.

You can also send links to your PC from the mobile Cortana app in the same manner as Edge.

Change device name of your PC

Before you started throwing links from your phone to your PC, you probably didn't give a thought about the official Device name of your PC. If it's an ugly jumble of numbers and letters, then you can change it to something more pleasing and informative. To do so, go to Settings > System > About and then under Device specifications, click the Rename this PC button. Give it a new name, click Next and after a restart, your PC will begin answering to its new name.

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