AirDroid makes your phone and computer talk more

Look, no cables!

Nothing to install on your computer, no USB cable to plug into anything. AirDroid makes your phone talk to your computer over the air.

Yep, there are more of those. Including junk programmed by phone manufacturers. Motorola Phone Portal looks like it came as an afterthought.

AirDroid leaves the competition in the dust. It lets you manage apps and save backups of them, and it connects you with your pictures, movies, songs, and other files. Bonus feature if your phone is rooted: show your home screens on your computer and make screenshots of them.

The latest update beefs up the security of the computer-to-phone connection, lets you split the AirDroid browser window into multiple desktops, and speeds up app management. The new option of logging in by scanning a QR code may be useful for those who're too lazy to type a six digit password.

Work to do

AirDroid shows your text messages, but it won't back them up. It won't show MMSs either, and it has trouble displaying messages from different time zones in the correct order.

The contact manager ignores most of your address book fields. It handles names, numbers, notes, and nothing else. AirDroid definitely needs to learn how to read and edit each and every bit of data in your contacts list.

Tips

AirDroid is useful without a computer too. Its built-in task manager gets you to your running apps much faster than the stock app manager, which will save you a bit of time when you quickly want to kill some misbehaving apps.

Save your shift key: the AirDroid passwords are not case sensitive.

Warning: the ringtone manager has a deceptive "in use" label. It only labels active tones if they're used by Android itself. It ignores tones used by non-stock apps like VoIP, WhatsApp, or your favourite calendar and alarm clock apps.

• AirDroid (Google Play)