Once you start using a smartphone in earnest, you quickly discover that the more you connect it with your computer, the more useful it becomes. I constantly find myself checking traffic on the laptop maps before leaving, or hastily scribbling down an address or a postcode for the Google Navigation when I get into the car. But what I really needed is a quick and easy way to send from the computer to my phone without any intervening hassles.

Cue PushBullet, a small freeware app which I find myself using more and more since I first discovered it a week or so ago. The product, which comprises a website dashboard and freeware Android app, connects your phone to your computer via your Google account and web browser.

What this means is if you’re logged in to your Google account on the computer, and you want to move something onto your phone, all you have to do is copy paste it into the PushBullet browser page, and hit the Push It! button. The data, which can be addresses, lists (e.g. a shopping list), files or just a simple note, then appears instantly in your Android phone’s notification bar.

What makes that great is you don’t have to open an app to access it, it’s all there front and center just like a text message notification, ready for instant use. Nice!

The file, note or whatever will then be sent immediately to your handset, and stored for instant access in the notification bar. After you access it, it moves to an archive in the app itself. It’s fast and very convenient. There are a couple of things we’d like to see approved. For one thing, it seems like you need to specify your device each time you log into the online app, we’d like to see a default set so it’s automatic.

We’d also like more power over what you can do with the content once you push it onto the phone. The shopping list feature and integration with Maps is great, but we’d also like the ability to cut/paste the data into other apps or locations, and we understand this is coming soon.

All in all this is one of those apps which creeps up on you, until you discover you’re using it a lot more than you realized. It’s fast, simple and does the job, and you can’t say fairer than that, can you?