Friday 23 November 2012

Choosing a File Manager for your Nexus 7 Android Device: ES File Explorer vs ASTRO File Manager

You have your Nexus 7 or any other Android device for that matter; you sure need a way to navigate your device and access your files. I will pitch two well known apps, ES File Explorer and I ASTRO File Manager, head to head.

ASTRO File Manager
This was the first app I tried so I'll review this first. When you launch ASTRO it opens up the home screen which provides 3 tabs: location, searches, and recent.


From the Locations tab, you can choose to browse your local storage, scan the network you are on, or access your Google drive and Dropbox cloud storage. Yes you can browse Google drive and Dropbox directly from ASTRO.
I found it difficult to discover my network at work with ASTRO, something that was simple with ES. All I got is this screen shot below. 

However, browsing your local storage works as expected; your folders are displayed and you can tap to access your files. One place I find ASTRO lacking is bluetooth sharing.
Long pressing a File or folder brings up a menu at the bottom where you can choose to copy, move, delete, or rename your file or folder. It also presents the three bar options menu. The options menu brings up options which allow you to perform tasks such as: select all; open as; check properties of a file or folder; share; or zip your files.


The share option is where my focus is now. As the screen shot below shows, it gives you the option to send to file to your cloud storage (Google drive, Dropbox, and Sky drive in my case), and it also allows you to send files to Gmail, Evernote and Skype. One feature that is conspicuously missing is the ability to share via bluetooth. This was the very reason I had to get another app. 



Besides browsing through your files, ASTRO also allows you to perform some tasks. A swipe from the right brings up the tools pane where you can analyse your SD card usage or kill running tasks. A swipe from the left brings up the locations pane where you can quickly navigate to specific locations.


Along came ES File Explorer
The home screen of ES isn't as clean as that of ASTRO but it is feature packed. The top row presents your locations as tabs. You can tap the tabs or swipe to flip your screen between Local, LAN, FTP, and Net.



The Local tab displays the contents of your device. LAN allows you to navigate the network you are on and copy, move, or read files from another computer. You can discover other devices on your network by hitting the search button on your LAN screen.



The next is the FTP tab. I haven't actually used this but I believe you can add an FTP server just as you can add a network device.
The last is the Net tab where you may wish to add your cloud storage. Where ASTRO only supports Google drive and Dropbox, ES supports box, sugarsync, dropbox, skydrive, Google drive (gdrive), Amazon s3, yandex, and Ubuntu one. You do agree with me that ES File Explorer has the better of ASTRO here.



Besides the various screens, Sharing files are a lot easier with ES. While browsing your local files and folders; long pressing a File or folder brings up a context menu as an overlay, with a long list of options: open as, cut, copy, rename, etc. Scroll to the bottom to access the share menu. Tapping the share menu brings up the "share via" screen and mine shows I can share this file via: Bluetooth, Google drive, Dropbox, Evernote, Gmail, Skydrive, and Skype.



My verdict
Both ES File Explorer and ASTRO File Manager are great apps, packing all these great features for a free app, however, ES File Explorer does come out on top. It has more features and they mostly work as expected. The ASTRO team continue to develop the app as it has a greater updated frequency compared to ES. However, my goto file manager is ES.