So, it’s something I take for granted on a daily basis, but not until recently after playing with someone’s iPad that I realized something… it’s not only relatively easy to send a file to an Android [and share], but we have a multitude of ways to do it.

Sure, I’m sure there’s ways to do it on an iPad as well, but after playing with one for the better part of 20 minutes, there was no ‘obvious solution’, despite how much of the tagline for the iOS items is “it just works”… this tech savvy guy couldn’t easily figure out how to do it.

Well, okay, I had my fun bashing iProducts yesterday, so I won’t anymore; and what I want to talk about today is how we can achieve something simple, like sending a PDF file, from your computer to your device can be accomplished.

So, imagine this… you have a large file (or several files) you want to send to your device… what are your options?

On Android I’ve found many ways to achieve this:

USB Cable

microSD card (where applicable)

internet options

• cloud sharing
• attachments
• ftp

Wifi connection

there’s probably others, but these are the main ones I’ll talk about.

#1 – USB Cables

Generally on most devices you purchase it comes with a USB cable for not only charging, but connecting with your main computer.  I can’t think of a single instance in the past while where this cable wasn’t included.

Plugging your phone into your computer usually prompts your phone with a ‘how do you want to connect’ option (or there’s a setting in the phone menu to adjust this behaviour).  Options may include ‘charge only’, ‘usb mass storage’, ‘MTP device’, etc…  The one we’re interested in is the ‘usb storage’ option.  On my phone running CM9 I leave it with MTP, as it works pretty similarly.

Doing this then has your phone act as a USB memory stick, essentially, where it’ll pop up as a ‘drive F’ on your computer.  Where you’ll be able to see all the files on the phone, and copying files is as easy as copy/paste, or drag and drop.

Now on some of the older phones, using a USB storage method will cause your phone to be ‘unavailable’ as it’s serving those files with your computer, and not being able to handle doing 2 of them at once (i.e. you can’t copy MP3 files to your computer and play them on the phone at the same time).  MTP seems to be ok on this front, but often I’ll get “your device may not play this file properly” when I copy to the device (just click ok and things are fine then).

#2 – microSD cards

Now, I think for the most part, most of you know my history with removable storage, and I’m not a fan of it, but it’s definitely a viable option, especially as the price for bigger and bigger cards keeps coming down.

*note, for best quality, I’d recommend cards of Class 6 or higher…

To copy files to the card you can do this one of 2 ways.  First is to connect using the USB cable to your phone, and instead of just seeing DRIVE F, on your computer, you’ll see DRIVE F (the phone storage), and DRIVE G (removable storage).  On my old Captivate there was a folder in the internal storage called “external SD” that would access it the card.

The other option is to remove the card and use a card reader.  Problem with that is sometimes you can’t access the card without removing the battery first… and if you can, you should still do an ‘unmount drive’ before you remove it.  After that, plop it into the card reader, and use it like a USB drive.

#3 Internet

There’s a couple of options with cloud version.  The catch with these versions is that not always will you have a ‘save as’ dialogue to choose where to save the file. You may end up saving the file to a generic ‘download’ folder.  So if you want it to go to a specific place, you’ll have to move the file later.

Email

You could email the file to yourself.  But sometimes your email server, or the email client doesn’t exactly like the file type and may not give you a “save as” option.  The GMail app is much better now and seems to be able to handle most files nowadays tho’.

Keep in mind, some email accounts limit the size of the attachment.  So no sending entire MP3 albums in one email, you may have to send several emails.

FTP

If you have an ftp storage, apps like AndFTP will help you access those folders and download away.

Cloud

If you haven’t been following my posts, then you won’t know the many options that I’ve talked to you that are available as: Dropbox, Box, CX, Minus, SugarSync, Cubby, Asus Webstorage, Drive, SkyDrive, Ubuntu One…

Upload the file from wherever, to the cloud server, on your phone, use the app to download.  Simple as that.

Downside to using cloud is that it eats data… so if you want to transfer 10MB file, it’ll use 20MB (10 to upload, 10 to download)… if you’re on Wifi, not an issue obviously, unless you provider really restricts you.  So transferring a few gigs of movies to watch may not be best suited to cloud.

#4 – Wifi connection

Alternatively you could use some other device to device wireless connection  like bluetooth (I used this non-stop on my old Palm devices after IR became passe) or NFC.

One of the popular apps for this is Wifi File Explorer.  Essentially you run the app on your phone, which it sets itself u pas a file server on your wifi network.  You can then use any device connected to that network to connect to the server it set up.

From there you upload to the ‘server’ as you would any cloud server type device.  You can download from the phone, or upload to it.  It’s super handy, and works on just about any network I’ve ever seen.  Surprisingly it’s fast, and because it uses your ‘intranet’ it doesn’t use any bandwidth from your service provider.

So… that’s how I do it… how about you?