Android and Macs don’t always play nice with each other, especially when it comes to transferring files from your device to your computer. Even when using a cable, OS X needs an extra utility to recognize an Android device, which isn’t very stable…
But why bother using cables and additional utilities when your Mac and your Android device can communicate wirelessly and seamlessly with each other? Thanks to DroidNAS, your Mac will automatically recognize any Android device running the application as a network drive and display it in the Finder.
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I remember the time I had a PDA, 11 years ago, and how thrilled I was about editing Word and Excel documents straight from my handheld device. I lost my excitement when I realized the mobile applications didn’t offer the same features as the desktop ones. More than a decade later, our phones and tablets have more processing power than computers did back then. Today, we can surely expect them to offer similar features, no matter the device they’re running on.
Applications such as Google Drive and QuickOffice are useful when it comes to basic text editing and computing, but they don’t provide the same features and experience as the full Office suite. Not only do these often lead to compatibility issues, they also prevent you from accessing advanced features such as Excel macros, custom PowerPoint animations and automated footnotes in Word. CloudOn tries to solve the problem by running Microsoft Office on an actual computer and letting you control it from your phone or tablet. Let’s have a look at what the app has to offer and see if it can really replace a computer to use Word, Excel and PowerPoint.
During the month of May, we’ve looked at various ways to keep Android and iOS in sync. We started with the essentials, by exploring ways to sync your emails, contacts and calendar. We then looked at media and various solutions to replicate your photos, videos and music across both platforms, and a selection of useful apps to sync daily content such as news, articles, tasks, notes, financials, passwords and documents, using third party cloud-based services.
However, even though the first three parts were great ways of keeping both devices in sync, using iOS and Android together has limitations. In this last part, we’ll look at the various elements that prevent proper sync between the two platforms, lead to frustration due to differences in user experience or problems resulting from the application stores respective to each platform.
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Over the past two weeks, we focused on making the sync process between your iOS and Android devices as easy as possible. We started by looking at keeping email, contacts and calendar data sync’ed, before recommending various solutions to replicate media content across devices.
This week we’ll take a more general approach and suggest various applications and services that save your content in the cloud and synchronize it transparently across devices and platforms. Whether you read articles and books on various phones and tablets, or need your notes and tasks sync’ed or simply want to keep track of your expenses across platforms, we’ve got the right apps for you!
Last week we gave you some advice on how to keep your data, email, contacts and calendar perfectly synced between your Android phone or tablet and an iOS device. Although these are essential elements to synchronize between your devices, replicating media from your iPad or iPhone to your Android device — and vice-versa — can also prove very useful.
Indeed, whether you run out of battery, lose your phone or prefer to use a larger screen, you shouldn’t have to worry about manually transferring your content to every single device you have. To make this chore seamless and transparent for you, we’ve selected a handful of apps and tools that will automate the process.
Many of us have devices that run on different operating systems, for example a work iPhone and a personal Android device. Looking at my specific case, I use a Samsung Galaxy Note II as my everyday phone and recently bought an iPad mini, which led me to explore ways of keeping the two in perfect sync.
In an always-connected world, it’s relevant for the two devices to communicate with each other and share data. Most importantly, having your emails, contacts and calendars synchronize from one device to the other is essential. This process should be seamless and transparent to you, so that all your content can be updated on both devices with no hassle. That’s what I will explore in the first part of this series.
We recently selected 46 great applications to synchronize content seamlessly between your Android device and your computer so you can enjoy the same content on the go and on your computer without having to worry about manually transferring data.
Today, we’d like to push things a little further and make Android interact directly with your computer. We’ve handpicked a bunch of apps to remotely control or access your computer from your phone, stream content from your computer directly to your tablet or phone, and even use your Android device as an extra monitor.
Social networks are becoming extremely prevalent in our daily lives and people check them from their bed as soon as they wake up. Many need to be constantly connected to their friends and share what’s happening with them. With this need to keep in touch with friends, it only makes sense to access this kind of information more easily.
Facebook Home offers to replace your Android launcher with a new social experience that ensures you’re always aware of your friends’ activities. With this home screen, a quick glance lets you see their photos and posts and your Facebook notifications. It definitely becomes easier to know what your friends are up to and interact with them, but is it worth ditching your current launcher?
Hailing a cab in busy cities is not always easy, especially after partying hard on a Friday night. Even worse, the awful experience of encountering a rude driver, a smelly car or being charged additional fees can easily ruin a great night and make you reconsider taking a cab next time you go out. The simplest way to avoid these problems, but also to impress friends and ensure a spotless drive, is to hire a personal driver. While this doesn’t seem like an option for most of us, Uber is the perfect solution to the problem: an on-demand private driver, who’s always sharply dressed, comes to pick you up in the fanciest vehicle in town and makes sure you’re seated comfortably during your trip.
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Smartphones are great devices that let you listen to music, take photos, browse the web, save and share content, store various files, make lists and take notes, remember contact information and even save your passwords. While having intelligent devices in our pockets is great, sharing their content with computers is even better. Because computers are the most essential tool to most workers, and also because they have significantly bigger screens than phones, sharing content between our Android phones and tablets and computers makes sense.
