Nearby Share for Windows (By Google) is now officially available, and terrible (in some cases)
If you’ve wanted to quickly share a document or image between your phone and your laptop Nearby Share for Windows (By Google) is here and it allows you to easily share between your phone and laptop or tablet or pretty much anything. The problem is, for my use case it’s absurdly slow.
OK before I go any further it turns out that it’s terrible across networks, but if you’re on the same network it’s fine. You won’t believe the amount of time it took me to discover my laptop was on FH-Service, and my phone was on FH. Same router, different AP name.
On my tests (different network names, same AP) transfers came in at a speed of about a megabyte a minute while on the same network (different AP name however, same device,) with the phone 4 inches away from my laptop. A transfer of one 5 megabyte file (a photo) took over four minutes.
Across network, several requests just failed, a 33 second video was claiming anywhere between 1 hour and 17 minute to over 4 hours
Checking Speedtest on the same network the phone was showing 548/554Mbps, and the laptop was similar.
In the same network with both on the same AP name, transfers went well. My assumption is most people are going to be in that situation. I just happen to not be. That direct connection across networks though is terrible though.
I guess in most cases this is not going to be an issue, but my phone and laptop occupy different Wi-Fi spaces by design.
Read Google’s announcement about nearby share rolling out here.
