Entertainment
Blurring the lines
Our immersion in technology has become so deep in recent times that we use multiple devices at any given time.Binit Bana
Cross-device work—with its tedious data inconsistencies and slow (and in most cases) manual updating requirements—has been a nuisance for quite a long time. It’s not that there haven’t been any innovations to tackle the problem, but it’s only recently that there have been created a number of ways to resolve the issue—especially if you’re an Android user. Here’s a brief look at the best ones out there that are attempting to blur the lines between our devices.
Mighty Text
This is an app primarily dedicated to giving you full control of your phone’s SMS feature across multiple devices. All you need to do is download the app on your Android phone, log in through your Gmail account and link it to your PC through its web app or chrome extension.
After the synchronisation, the web app displays all your contact details and message archives on the PC itself. The web app does provide you with a few other facilities besides simple texting: you can upload/share photos and videos between your devices or make phone calls through your PC—I personally don’t see the point in this as you have to pick up your phone to have a conversation. And it also has a pretty nifty battery-status bar and a phone locator.
If you’re just looking for a PC SMS app, this is the right bet. But one of the biggest standout features of Mighty Text, its message scheduler feature, is only available with an upgrade to a paid pro version, which might slightly decrease its appeal to the general Nepali users.
Just a fair bit of warning: if you do consider to discontinue with Mighty Text after a while, you will be able to uninstall the app from your phone, but your account will not be deleted automatically. The company requires you to send in a mail requesting the termination of your account and all your imported information (as user authentication info), which, honestly, is a bit of a hassle. Moreover, a quick response is not guaranteed.
Pushbullet
Quickly becoming a darling in the Android community, Pushbullet also provides SMS through PC facilities, but what sets it apart from the rest has to be its feature that allows you to “push” links, files and notes across your devices. With Pushbullet you won’t have to fiddle around with your multiple devices to enable them to work on the same thing, which is particularly true with links.
But its biggest draw currently has to be the Universal Copy & Paste feature. If enabled across devices, once you copy any text in one device the feature lets the user instantly paste it on any other device, which can be incredibly useful. Apart from that, it also displays your phone notifications on the desktop, such as SMSes, incoming calls and app and social-feed notifications.
Pushbullet’s popularity can also be attributed to its simple interface and design, the fact that it’s lightweight (takes less than 15 MB) and background operability—unlike AirDroid, it runs as soon as the PC is turned on.
AirDroid
Unlike the two other apps on the list, Airdroid can be considered a complete android management app. It not only allows information to be passed on across devices, including SMSes, it provides control over your phone or your tablet, which would have been unprecedented in the not-so-recent past. There’s so much that AirDroid can do that at times you forget about one or the other of its features.
Get all your contacts, messages, call logs and phone notifications delivered straight to your PC; transfer files from your PC to phone without a wire, through a common wireless network or through AirDroid’s cloud service; locate, lock or wipe your phone remotely if lost; create a hotspot through your phone; and you can also do much, much more.
The problem with AirDroid is that it tries to do a lot of things at once and if you’re not a constant user, it might be a bit too much, given that the increased background activities takes up valuable RAM space, reducing performance and battery life.