Monday, August 2, 2010

Send Links from Firefox to an Android Phone

Android 2.2 has a cool service for sending the messages to phones: Android Cloud to Device Messaging. "The service provides a simple, lightweight mechanism that servers can use to tell the mobile applications to contact the server directly, to fetch the updated application or with user data."

A simple way to use this service is to send a link from your browser to an Android device. Chrome to Phone is a Chrome extension that makes this much possible, assuming that you also install an Android application on your phone. The extension has been recently updated and you can use it to the send links, phone numbers and text from the web pages.

There's also an unofficial Firefox extension called "Send to phone", which offers with similar features. The Firefox extensions adds an option to the contextual menu, so you don't have to click on the toolbar button to send some of the text.

http://felix-googleblog-archive.blogspot.com
http://felix-googleblog-archive.blogspot.com
Some things you can try:
* send a Google Maps link and the Google Maps app from your phone should handle it
* send a link to a YouTube video and the video should start playing on your phone
* copy a phone number from a web page and send it to your phone
* copy a short text from a web page (<1KB) and send it to your phone's clipboard.

Note that you need a device that uses the Android 2.2 (Froyo), which is officially available for Nexus One, HTC Evo and HTC Desire. Motorola Droid will be updated to Froyo starting from the next week, while the other phones will be updated in the coming months.

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