Microsoft announced late Friday that it had enabled Xbox One game streaming to Windows 10 PCs and tablets. It also announced a few changes to the Xbox app on Windows 10. Game streaming was previously available only to Xbox One preview program members. It allows you to remotely play an Xbox One—and, soon,  via backwards compatibility functionality, Xbox 360 —games on a Windows 10 PC or tablet. The console and PC must both be on the same network, and you will of course need an Xbox One controller attached to your PC. (Today, that is USB-based, but  Microsoft recently announced a wireless adapter .) Setup is simple enough: On the console, navigate to Settings, Preferences and make sure the option “Allow game streaming to other devices (beta)” is enabled. On your Windows 10 PC or tablet, connect an Xbox Wireless controller with USB cable and then launch the Xbox app and navigate to Connect and connect your Xbox One console. When you do, you will see a new Stream option for game st...

Microsoft promised this May that it was bringing Cortana to iOS and Android, confirming rumors from earlier in the year. The Android version leaked today—there's an APK floating around—and Microsoft has opened up an invitation-only beta to let people test the company's digital personal assistant for themselves, at least if they live in the US or China. To sign up to the beta you'll need one of a handful of recent Android handsets, and a Microsoft account that's linked to the Windows Insider program. In promoting its cross-platform software ambitions, Microsoft has said that its experiences will be mobile, following people from device to device, but best on Windows. The idea here is that Windows 10 users will use and depend on Cortana on their PCs, and hence will want her to be available on their phones, no matter which smartphone platform they use. On Windows and Windows Phone/Windows Mobile, Cortana can in principle be more deeply integrated—enabling, for example, ...