The AirDroid app is probably the easiest way to manage your Android phone from your Mac or Windows PC. It lets you quickly transfer files between your phone and your computer, or from one Android phone to another, without requiring any USB cables.
The newest version of AirDroid – version 3.0 – is even better.
Earlier,
if you had to transfer a file from the computer to your Android phone
via AirDroid, you had to open a special web page in your web browser,
authenticate the connection and only then were you allowed to download
or upload files.
Now
AirDroid has released dedicated clients (software program) for both
Windows and Mac that mostly bypasses the need for a web browser. Once
you have installed the AirDroid software on your computer, you can
simply drag one or more files to the desktop app and the files are
instantly transferred to your Android device. It just works.
The
transfer happens extremely fast if your computer and your phone are
connected to the same WiFi network. However, if one of your devices is
not on LAN, you can still send your files via the cloud. The files stay
in the cloud for a week before they are permanently deleted.
You
can view your phone call logs and also reply to SMS messages from the
computer. It is however not possible to initiate phone calls from the
desktop. And certain old features, like the ability to capture remote
screenshots and photographs using your phone’s camera, still require the
web browser.
AirDroid app on Android sports a clean look though its not Material Design
AirDroid
3 is not available (see update) in the Google Play store yet but you
can head over to beta.airdroid.com to download the Android app and the
desktop clients that available for both Mac and Windows. You’ll need to sideload the apk files and that essentially means letting your Android phone to install apps outside the apps store.
Update: AirDroid 3 is now live.
AirDroid or PushBullet – Which is Better?
PushBullet
is another popular alternative to AirDroid and offers similar features.
With PushBullet, you can push notes and links from Chrome to your
Android device with a right click, you can send files between various
devices and it can mirror your Android notifications on the desktop.
However,
the advantage with AirDroid is that it transfers files over WiFi (if
available) while Push Bullet uploads the files to its own servers which
is always slower than LAN transfer.
Both allow you to push text
notes but while AirDroid is a Android only solution, PushBullet is
available for both Android and iPhone. Also, Push Bullet offers a Chrome
extension allowing you to send links and text from desktop to phone
with a right-click. This is not available on AirDroid.
For now, I’ll prefer to have both apps on my phone.
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Courtesy: www.labnol.org
