There’s something big coming from Pushbullet – but it’s not quite ready yet. In the meantime, Pushbullet want to remind you exactly how cool they can be, by releasing a new tool called Portal, which ‘makes transferring files from your computer to your phone as simple as possible’.
Portal works on your local Wi-Fi network, sending files quickly over the air through your Wi-Fi. It’s not new, we’ve seen Airdroid doing this quite ably for a while, and even Pushbullet lets you send files as well, but this new tool with a reliance on Wi-Fi means you can send large files or a lot of files in a snap.
So how does it work? Well, to start you’ll need the Portal app from Google Play, then you’ll need to open portal.pushbullet.com on your computer. From there you scan a QR code and then drag and drop files or folders to your device.
The Portal app itself contains the basic instruction to go to the portal.pushbullet.com, as well as a button to open the QR scanner. Below you’ll see the files and folders you’ve transferred to make finding them that much easier – or if you have your own file browser installed, they’ll be in the ‘Portal’ folder on your storage.
The tool is live, as is the Portal app on Google Play. You can give feedback via the Pushbullet Beta community on Google+ as well, so head over and join that and let us know what you think of this new tool.
As stated in the article, Pushbullet already allows file transfers to devices via WiFi but that requires their Windows application to be installed on your PC. There’s even context menu integration so it’s pretty cool. I think the difference here is that this doesn’t require the additional software to function.
Pushbullet is awesome and keeps getting better. Only if could do WiFi Direct as well…