It does, however, provide the same Photos and File Explorer links to help the iPhone user to copy files to the PC. It does not show phone model information or the battery charge level. It just shows the storage status for the iPhone. If you use a USB cable to plug an iPhone into your PC, the Phone Companion app shows less information than it does for Android devices. However, it could be a very useful set of information and prompts to help non-power users.
If you plug an Android phone or tablet into your Windows 10 PC using a USB cable, the Phone Companion app identifies the device by model name, shows the battery charge status, and links to help you manually move files using either Windows’ Photos app or File Explorer. And, like Google Photo, OneDrive’s image recognition sometimes makes some interesting mistakes. Some of these tags are: Animal, Beach, Group photo, Outdoor, People, Screenshot, and Sky. In testing, I found dozens of tags associated with my photos.
Like Google Photos, OneDrive automatically tags your photos using image recognition technology. If you have more than one device backing up to OneDrive, all the photos will be stored in one place.
If you choose to automatically upload photos to OneDrive, you will be able to find it by clicking on the Photos link in the left sidebar of the web page. If you already have it installed like I did, you can skip this step.
It then asks you to download and install the OneDrive app for your mobile device.
Two products that will be released in the near future are grayed out and labeled “coming soon.” These are the Cortana personal assistant for Android and iOS, and the ability to stream songs stored in OneDrive.ĭuring the Phone Companion photo syncing process, the app checks if you are signed in to a Microsoft account of some kind (Hotmail,, etc.).