If you’ve ever wanted to transfer a movie or a huge file on to a smartphone, you’ll know it can be quite a time consuming process. Whether you use bluetooth, an online service or just the old trusty USB cable, it seemingly takes ages.
What Superbeam does is that it uses the Wi-Fi-Direct method to directly pair up with a device that’s in range and shares data with it. The good thing about Superbeam is that it doesn’t need to connect to any existing Wi-Fi networks. It also doesn’t restrict the types of file you are sharing. The data can be just about anything from music, videos, pictures to other files like APKs.
To start sharing stuff, both the devices must be running Superbeam. Then you simply choose the file you want to send and press share button. To start the sending process, the app will generate a QR code which can be read from the receiver phone’s camera or a key which can be entered in the receiver phone. If you can’t be bothered, just bring both phones near each other and it will use NFC to pair up the devices.
We can think of it as Android Beam or Samsung’s S beam but the difference is that Superbeam is faster and it doesn’t restrict you to a specific set of phones. You can use it on any Android phone. You can even use it as an alternative to a USB cable as you could share data without connecting your phone with a PC.
In our tests, it only took around 2 minutes to share a 1 GB movie between two Sony Xperia Z’s. Transfer rates were about 20-40 Mbps on average devices while on high end devices, you can even get up to 70-75 Mbps. The time of sharing varies device to device as every device packs different hardware.
Superbeam is available on Android, iOS and PC (Windows, Mac, Linux).
