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AndExplorer

Posted Friday, April 24th, 2009 at 5:00 am by Joel Gray 10 Comments

User Rating4.25/5

AndExplorer is a file manager for Android devices. It allows browsing files and folders stored on device and sdcard. It can sort by name, size and date. Rename, delete, and create folder features are available. It is able to uncompress ZIP, GZIP and TAR files too. It can be called from another application with Intent facilities.

Price: Free

AndroidTapp.com Android App Review:

Features:

AndExplorer is brought to you be LYESOFT, the same folks who make AndFTP, BucketUpload, and S3Anywhere.  AndExplorer comes with the standard features you would expect.  The ability to browse files, change, change to different folders, copy, move, rename, delete and create new folders.

It also has a few bonus features not present in many of the other file browsers in the Market.  Of particular interest are:

• The ability to uncompress files in zip, gzip and tar formats.
• Sorting by name (default), size and date.  Useful for finding that recent download or the image you just captured.
• Multi-select files and folders for batch operations.
• For developers, AndExplorer provides Intent’s for other applications to interact with.

Note: At the time of this review, AndExplorer was just released as 1.0BETA1.  Some of the features and elements may change by the time it reaches release status.

Usefulness:

Frankly, this type of application will not likely be needed by the average user.  If you are a developer, or someone that hacks around with your Android, or simply a person that finds organizing files a way of life then you may want to check this one out.  If you don’t have a rooted phone, it’s unlikely that you will need to do any file organization on the internal storage system since most directories are protected.  In that event, it’s probably easier to do most of your work via mounting the SD card via USB connection to your PC.

Ease of Use & Interface:

AndExplorer was fairly easy to use.  The UI looks very clean with nice with polished icons and a well thought out menu system.  I believe it has a lot of potential.  There were only a couple of items that we hope will be addressed before the software reaches release status:

• The files and folders rows are not very tall.  Someone that tends to have problems with touch accuracy may have trouble selecting the correct item.  A nice fix would be a user selectable option for the size of the rows.
• The back button takes you back to the home screen.  Many other file browsers subscribe to the web browser UI paradigm where back takes you to the last place you were.  It would be nice if I used the “sdcard” shortcut, if I could then hit the back button to get to my home folder.
• The multi-select is via long click rather than a check box.  It’s not terrible, but it’s a little odd.

Frequently Used:

Potential daily use if you are an application developer or you like to hack around with your phone, otherwise it’s not likely to be needed often.

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