One of the biggest challenges of Android Phone users is being able to flexibly and effortlessly manage phone files and apps locally and remotely
I know the popular Android Os comes with an inbuilt file explorer/browser/manager but the simple truth is users are always looking for the best Android file manager with more feature that enhance user experience.
My wife had some wonderful pictures on her phone so after transferring some to my Android phone through Bluetooth, I thought there could be a better way to handle these files.
A quick search on Google Play brought up what I think is an excellent free Android file manager called ES File Explorer
ES File Explorer for Android is not only a free app. It is feature-rich and that can hugely positively affect your experience with your mobile device.
It helps you to manage your bookmarks, applications, tasks, etc. What’s even more interesting is that this app doesn’t only help you manage local files. You can connect and manage file on remote devices through LAN, FTP, Bluetooth and cloud storage files.
Here are some of its features;
- Multi-operate on files/apps and powerful clipboard
- Change Views and Sort
- Search files on SD card, shares and Bluetooth
- Share files with friends
- Text viewer and editor
- Play audio or video files locally/remotely or to friends
- View files or open other files with third party programs
- Set pictures as wallpaper or contact icon
- Show/hide files
- Zip/unzip the zip files
- Check files with MD5/SHA
- Set folder as home directory in local
- Set folder as server in Remote
- Analyze use of space on SD card
- App backup & (un)install & make shortcut
- Root explorer
Using ES File Explorer is quite easy. The first thing is to browse to the folder where your files are located. This may be local (on phone memory or Secure Digital (SD) card) or remote best android file explorer.
One quick test I did was connect to my blog’s (this blog) WP files through FTP.
My idea is to connect and download my media folder. This is where all my blog images are stored. So anything goes wrong, I can, always roll back easily. Just at this point, I was begining to take this app as the best file explorer for android.
I was quite excited with this app so I quickly wanted to connect to my cloud storage and browse the different possibilities. So I connected to my Dropbox where my blog’s backup copies are located. EZ File supports support box, sugarsync, dropbox, skydrive, gdrive, s3, kuaipan, kanbox, vdisk, baidu, yandex, ubuntu etc.
And I was able to browse my files on DropBox
How to effectively manage your SDCard storage space
ES Files has an inbuilt SDCard Analyst. What this feature does is analyse your SDCard and tells you total space, used space and available space.
You are also given details of all files on this storage organ and how much space each item occupies. This information can help in free space while not deleting vital files.
Optimizing your device with ES File Manager
One exciting thing with this Android App is the ability it has to optimize your phone. With the System Manager, you can kill running applications that eat up space. This evidently frees space and makes your device faster. You are able to kill all running apps at once or select individual apps and kill them.
The optimizer allows you to clear device cache and this for the most part frees a considerable amount of space on your blog.
Finally, it allows you to optimize power by shutting down some background apps that are unneeded. Note that while your phone runs, it uses power. The more apps you have running, the more power your phone uses so shutting down unnecessary applications is a great step towards saving power.
You may not be able to dig deep into your phone to find out which app is running and which is not. This optimizer does the job and all you have to do is tap to execute it.
ES File Explorer Security
One of the things I was concerned about while trying out this Android File Manager App was security at the levels of encryption and password protection.
As it allows you to be able to interact with files (including sensitive documents) on different locations, there is need to ask security questions.
1 – Protecting local files: You can encrypt files on your device to avoid unauthorized access. To do this, press maintain the file/folder. A password window will pop open. Enter your new password. This password will be required to open the encrypted file/folder.
To decrypt you can press it and input the password you used to encrypt.
Once decrypted the file won’t be encrypted automatically you should encrypt it manually you can check “use same password for next encryption” so that next time you want to encrypt it you don’t need to set a password again.
Another option to protect your local files is to hide and put them in the hide list. Press maintain file/folders to hide and select hide from toolbar you can add them to hide list
From left sidebar→tools→hide list you can find and manage your hidden files
2 – Protecting Remote files: Connecting to remote locations (FTP, Cloud, LAND,etc) can pose a security issue any moment if your phone goes to the wrong hands. In your absence, any body in possession of your phone can access your remote files and that’s not going to be an exciting experience.
IT is however simple to set a password and protect your network resources. Each time a user tries to access a network resource, the password will be require.
Go to Settings of ES → Password settings → Turn on network protection
There are 3 different levels to set a password at this point;
- Set a password to protect your Hide List (a folder that contains your hidden files)
- Password to access ES File Explorer. This means no access to the app with the password
- And finally, password to access your network resources
This will assure full protection of your files both locally and remote. The password management in this Android file manager makes it quite interesting.
If for any reason you forgot your password, you just have to uninstall and reinstall the app.
This file management app for Android is free so you can go get your copy from Google Play here or checkout its website here for free download.
There is much more this app can do to make your device more friendly and useful. Make sure you install it.
Do let me know what you think in the comment box below.