If you have a smartphone and a tablet and have wanted to send content from one to the other then let me show you a great app that can do just that.
A lot of you may already know what Pushbullet is. It’s become quite popular since it was released and has been downloaded over 1 million times on the Play Store. The app and service started off small, but has slowly gained more and more features as time goes on. The company behind the app(which is a small team from what I hear), has even been able to secure some venture capital in order to expand and support the service as it’s grown. The app has gained some bad publicity when it stripped down some of its feature and started making users pay for them.
Still, it offers a few great features and some of the most important ones can be used for free. Today I wanted to talk about a feature that lets you send just about any type of content from one device to the other.
This content can be a link to a website, a picture from the web, a photo you just took, or even just some text like a reminder or something. Google had previously had an app that did some of this, but it was unreliable, clunky and they have(or will) be dropping support for it. Before that, I was having to use email to get this type of content from one device to the other. While this was reliable and it did work, it wasn’t fast at all and it took more effort than it should to complete a simple task.
Thankfully Pushbullet came along and that’s what I want to show you today.
- Download and Install Pushbullet
- Connect Your Google Account to Pushbullet
- Enable or Skip the Extra Features it Offers
- Then Install Pushbullet on the Other Devices You Want to Send Content to
- Pick up Either Device that Pushbullet is Installed on
- Go to a Website, Photo or Select Some Text You Want to Send
- Tap the Share Button/Icon
- Then Share it via Pushbullet to the Device You Want
Explanation
Pushbullet integrates extremely well into Android’s share system so most pieces of content are just a few taps away from sharing to another device. You’ll need to install the Pushbullet app, launch it, connect your Google account to it and then either enable or skip through the few extra features that they prompt you about when you first launch it. These are very useful features for some people, and maybe I’ll cover them in future tip articles, but today I’m focusing on the core feature of Pushbullet. These feature can all be enabled or disabled later, so it’s okay to skip through them right now if you’d like.
Once you have one device with Pushbullet installed and setup on, you’ll need to do the same to any other device you want to send content to. This could be a tablet, a secondary(maybe older) Android smartphone that you use as a media player or anything. Basically, we just need Pushbullet setup on any devices you want connected within your own little network. Pushbullet even has a feature that lets you add friends so you can push this type of content to your friends or family members very quickly and very easily. When all of your devices are setup properly, you can go to any piece of content you want to share and then use Android’s share feature.
This share feature is usually different for each app, so I can’t give specific examples of how to share something. This share feature is built into most major apps though so it shouldn’t be hard to find. In the video above, you see me sharing the link to a website, sharing some highlighted text and sharing a photo from Google Photos. Finding where that share button is will be different on the various apps but the actual sharing part will be the same for everyone. The device I’m using is running Marshmallow, which introduced some changes into the sharing mechanic, but it’s still very close to how it was in Lollipop. Pushbullet is made to work on Android 4.1+, so if you’re running a modern version of the OS, then you should still get the same functionality as everyone else.
