Get a touch of Windows 10's Timeline feature right now

Some of the most interesting demos Microsoft showed off at Build 2017 in May were the cloud-powered features. Microsoft showed off new features like OneDrive Files On-Demand (aka Placeholders), Cloud-powered Clipboard, improved integration between Windows 10 PCs and Android/iOS phones, and Windows Timeline. Microsoft announced earlier this week that the company isn’t going to be releasing Timeline with the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update later this year — instead, it’ll arrive with the next update to Windows 10 sometime around March/April 2018.

Microsoft has actually already started testing some Timeline-related features for Android/iOS users already. If you are running the latest Cortana beta update on Android, you can use the “Recent Activities from PC” feature to get all the web pages you have visited in Microsoft Edge from your PC. The feature lets you view the history for a specific day too, which is also a small part of Timeline. Being able to access your recently visited websites from Microsoft Edge on Android and iOS is going to be a really useful feature for those using Microsoft Edge on their Windows 10 devices, and that’s mainly because users can’t access their Microsoft Edge activities like their bookmarks, browsing history, etc. when they are on the move due to the browser not being cross-platform.

This feature is actually part of Microsoft’s Pick Up Where You Left Off feature that started appearing with the Windows 10 Creators Update earlier this year, but the company was supposed to take things a major step forward with Timeline in the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update. Once Timeline arrives, you will also be able to continue working on websites and apps from one Windows 10 PC on another Windows 10 PC — for instance, if you are writing an email on your laptop, you can continue writing the same email when you move to your desktop PC.  But now that Timeline is delayed, some of these features will likely take a while to arrive if you’re a regular user. Windows Insiders will get to try out Timeline shortly after the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update starts rolling out to the public, however.

As I’ve recently noted, parts of Timeline can already be found in internal builds of Windows 10 and it’s quite rough at the moment in terms of the user-experience. The design of the feature itself is quite far from what we’ve seen at Build 2017 when it comes to the animations and all the other little things, too. The demos showed by Microsoft at Build 2017 were most likely just concepts so the real deal will definitely look quite different from what we’ve seen at Build back in May.

You can get a touch of Windows Timeline right now by downloading Cortana’s latest beta update on Android here. Make sure that you’re part of the Cortana beta testing program to be able to get the new feature.