How To Use Wifi Sharing on the Blackberry Playbook to Transfer Files

Want to be able to transfer all of your music, pictures, videos, and other fun stuff on your Blackberry Playbook onto your Windows PC and vise versa but don’t want to use the USB cable? No problem. RIM came up with an easy way to do just that with just a Windows PC and a Wifi network. Here’s how.

I. Enable Wifi Sharing on the Blackberry Playbook

1. On your Blackberry Playbook, swipe from off the top of the screen down onto the screen with your finger to open the settings menu (to learn more of these gestures, as RIM calls them, head to our How To Use Gestures procedure).

2. Then select Wifi.

3. Connect to a Wifi network (this MUST be the same network that the computer you want to share with is connected to).

4. Once connected to the Wifi network, go back and select Storage and Sharing from the settings menu.

5. Then select File Sharing and Wifi Sharing and turn them both ON.

6. Now, select the Properties button beneath that and put in a device name, the name of your computer’s workgroup, and then you can optionally set a username and password to protect access to the device.

II. Connect to the Blackberry Playbook from Your PC

1. Now, on your PC, go to the Start menu and then select My Computer.

2. On the left hand side look for Network and select that.

3. Now, you should see the name of the Playbook that you selected in the Wifi Sharing properties earlier. Double click it.

4. If you set a username and password, you will enter that here. Once confirmed, you should be looking at the Playbook’s files. You can now drag and drop between the two devices.

This is part of our Blackberry 101 section. Head to the entire collection of Blackberry 101 posts here.