Hate sending emails to yourself? Well Pushbullet is the app for you.
What is Pushbullet? Have you ever been in a situation here you have a picture or file on your phone or vice versa, and you want to transfer it onto your other device quickly? The first thing people think about is emailing yourself, but this can be frustrating and having an inbox full of email from yourself doesn’t really look great…
This is where Pushbullet comes in. Pushbullet is one of the easiest and fastest ways to send pictures, links, files, notes, lists, etc. Between your mobile devices to your desktop computers, using the apps for Android/ iOS/ Windows/ Mac. You can also use the Chrome or Firefox browser extensions. There have been a few updates since it’s release, but there has been a recent major update about a week ago, which added lots of new features which increase productivity and also make life even easier.
First you are greeted with an instant messaging type look, which is part of the new update. At the top there are three main tabs which you can also swipe between for ease of use. At the bottom of the app there is also an instant message looking bar which you select so that you could paste a link into, or a piece of text which you might want to read on your desktop device. Just above it there is selection tool which by default says ‘All of my devices’ this means that all your devices that you have signed into Pushbullet with, will receive whatever you send across. This is very handy because this means that all of your devices will have a copy of what you sent.
The tab to the left labeled ‘Friends’ has a similar layout, but has different threads. These are only created once you have selected people you would like to send things to. Again this is similar to instant messaging apps as they have different threads for different people which you select in order to send information across. This is easily done by selecting ‘New Conversation’ and selecting a contact. This is synced either through your Google account or your Facebook account which you can use one of these to sign in/ up with. If your friend or family member does not have Pushbullet then they will receive a standard email, but when they reply to the message, it will appear in a feed like an instant messaging conversation for ease of use. Each of the different conversations will be presented as separate threads which you can easily switch between. I think that this is a great feature as now I do not have to keep searching through my inbox when sending pictures to family members, I just go into the Pushbullet app and then I can send photos and others files seamlessly to my family members.
The tab furthest to the right is the ‘Channels’ tab. This was introduced before, but basically it’s where you can subscribe to news ‘Channels’ which will give you push notifications when new articles are available. Personally I do not use this feature because I have other apps which I am comfortable using as my news aggregators.
Other Features:
There is a burger style slide out menu, which you can use to quickly switch between personal and sharing with friends, and also the channels section of the app. Underneath this there is a ‘Notification Forwarding’ toggle. This is so that if you have Pushbullet installed on your Mac or PC then you can mirror your smartphone notifications to your computer. I find this very convenient as sometimes my phone is on the other side of the room charging on my bedside table. This means that I do not have to keep getting up and checking my phone as some notifications are unimportant which can wait, and by having my notifications mirrored across to my desktop I can choose which are important and which aren’t just by looking in the bottom right hand corner of my screen as they arrive.
Diving deeper, there is settings which have more features to play around with. There is the standard notification settings where you can choose the tone and whether it vibrates on receiving them or not. The third setting is strange but is a surprisingly useful feature which is the ‘Universal copy & paste’. It does exactly what it says, when you copy something on your mobile device you can paste it on your desktop, this is convenient as you might want to watch a video link someone sent you and you happen to be near your computer or vice versa. I haven’t had much luck with this feature as it can be hit and miss, but when it works around 7/10 times, it works like a dream as I do not have to paste it into the Pushbullet app and sent it that way. The next section of the settings as they are grouped, is the ‘Notification Forwarding’ toggles, you can choose whether you only want this feature active when you are connected to Wi-Fi, you can also only enable certain apps that you would like the notification mirroring to occur.
Privacy is the next tab, and by default this toggle for the ‘SMS phonebook autocomplete’ is toggled on as it syncs with your contacts, so that it is easier to find certain people instead of having to remember their email address. Finally, the last setting to play around with is the ‘Highway to Danger Zone’. It is sort of an experimental feature, so there is some bugs as it will not work all the time but the ‘Automatically copy link & notes’. This is where the app will save links and notes in a self-stored clipboard which you can access. I have not tried this feature yet, but I think that it could be a massive help as android only lets you copy one piece of information at a time.
I would recommend this app because after I used it for a week, because I noticed that my productivity had increased as it has become more convenient for me, as I actually use this app to transfer photos I make on my phone to my computer for my articles. Also when working I do not have to get up each time I receive a notification on my phone because of the notification mirroring feature.
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