Mac.sis making macs and S60 handsets talk

While the wireless convenience of Bluetooth is all the rage, there are still perfectly valid reasons for plugging in your mobile via an USB cable, for instance if you are transferring large amounts of data (such as music or photos). The USB connection still has a clear speed advantage. Read on more for oldskool USB tips.

Newer S60 devices (from 3rd Edition onwards) support the USB mass storage mode, which makes them universally usable as mass storage devices. In the mass storage mode, the phone acts as a removable drive, just like an USB memory stick or (chances are) your digital camera. Note that in order to use the mass storage mode, your phone needs to have a memory card inserted.

When you plug in the phone USB cable in your Mac, you should get the following query:

In order to use the phone as a general-purpose USB mass storage device, obviously you want to select the Mass storage option. A new drive should appear in your Finder, using the name that you have assigned to the memory card in the S60 device itself. By default, mine was NO NAME, which is not very sexy, so I changed it in Menu > Tools > Memory to Vimes.

As I only use the USB mass storage mode for data transfer (iSynchronisation goes through Bluetooth), I have removed the unneeded query above by heading for Menu > Tools > USB and by opting the handset not to bother me with this question at all:

From there on, you can use the drive in Finder as you would use any removable USB mass media such as a memory stick. As expected, the price you pay is that you have to unmount (eject) the drive in Finder before disconnecting the cable, just as you do with memory sticks or iPods (when managed manually).

Like mentioned early in the article, the USB mass storage mode is good for transferring photos and images that require a bit more bandwidth than Bluetooth can provide.