If you are new to Android, chances are you don’t know about NFC and how useful it can actually be. Today, we help you in exploring Android Beam — a relatively unknown NFC feature baked into Android that makes sharing content across multiple Android devices extremely easy.
What is Android Beam?
In a nutshell, Android Beam ‘beams’ the content of one Android device to another using NFC and/or Bluetooth. It allows for quick sharing of trivial content like Play Store app listings, Chrome tabs, Photos, Videos, YouTube links and more. Although Android Beam was introduced in Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich, the feature works best on devices running Android 4.1 or greater.
You have to also keep in mind that while sharing of URLs and other content is done over NFC itself, larger files like images and videos are transferred over Bluetooth, which is automatically turned off after the transfer is complete.
How to use Android Beam
Using Android Beam is pretty simple and does not even require you to play around with any settings. First, make sure that NFC and Android Beam are both enabled in both of the phones’ Wireless Networks settings. Then, simply open the app/URL or any other content that you want to share on your device. Bring the back of both devices in contact so that the NFC radios on them can communicate with each other. Also, make sure the screens on both phones are unlocked as the NFC radio is only active when the display is on.
Depending on the devices, the NFC radio can be located just about anywhere from top to bottom. Tap the various areas until you hear a beep sound at which point you will see a ‘Tap to Beam’ option on both. Now, simply tap on the screen of the device whose content you want to beam to the other in order to share the content.
On certain Samsung devices, Android Beam is disabled by default as it competes with the company’s own S-Beam feature. In such cases, you can enable Android Beam by going into Settings -> More -> NFC and toggling its switch to On position.
So the next time you have to share some content with your friends, instead of using Bluetooth, you can simply tap the back of the devices together to initiate the sharing process without bothering with Bluetooth pairing or other tedious transfer methods.
