S-Beam is Samsung’s wonderful take on Wi-Fi direct. It bypasses arduous pairing in favour of a simple tap, courtesty of the NFC chip inside your Samsung Galaxy S3. By tapping two phones together, you make the connection and instigate a W-Fi transfer of whatever content happens to be on your screen. Why would you want to do this? Because, with transfer speeds of 300Mb/s, there really is no faster way to fly data over the air from one phone to another.
Samsung’s S-Beam doesn’t just work with pictures, it also works with video and music content. When the phones are held back to back, the initiating phone’s screen suggests you tap it in order to send the file. Once tapped, separate the two handsets and before you know it, you’ve copied your content across devices. It is only integrated in Samsung’s multimedia apps, so won’t work in a file explorer for example, but for all those instances, there’s Wi-Fi Direct.
The key difference between Wi-Fi Direct and S-Beam is that Wi-Fi Direct doesn’t require you have a Samsung S-Beam compatible device to use it. It does however need you to pair your devices manually. This can simply be done by hopping into the menu, checking the Wi-Fi direct tab, searching for other Wi-Fi Direct phones and pairing. Once paired, the entirety of Androids share functionality is at your disposal, within reason. You can even transfer APKs and other less well known file types.
For something a little more visual, check out our video demo and if you’ve got any questions, just fire us a comment below.
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