Let's Talk Tech
Got a great viewer tip from the comments on one of my other videos! This is how you can move an app from your phone’s storage to a memory card in Windows Phone’s Storage Sense!
This is why I love the comments you folks post!
File management sounds boring, but it’s a really big deal, giving us control over what pics, vids, and documents live on our phone and who we can share them with. It’s something Android users take for granted, and now Windows Phone owners have the same capabilities!
Best of all, for people using Nokia handsets, this Files app finally gives us access to the full resolution pictures on our phones to back up and share online!
I love little gadgets like this.
I’m a stickler for file management. I like controlling everything about what files and media are on my various devices, where they live, and who I can share those files with. Leef has a handy little MicroUSB adapter which allows you to swap memory cards even easier! Even if your phone doesn’t have an SD card slot…
Continue reading “Review: Leef Access – MicroSD Memory Card Reader for Android!”
From our Facebook page, Robin asks:
Here’s a question relating to Android… When I plug my Moto X into my Windows PC using the supplied USB cable, it shows up as a storage device and I can copy stuff to/from it with no problems. But when I plug it into a USB port on my wife’s MacBook Pro, it’s not even recognized as a device. How can I access my Moto X from Mac OSX?
Hey Robin,
It’s because Apple can be frustrating about supporting standards like MTP. Apple refuses to natively support the USB Media Transfer Protocol. It’s how you can plug your phone into a PC and see files on your phone and computer at the same time.
There are two different ways to share files between a phone and computer, MTP and Mass Storage. If you use Mass Storage, the storage on your phone becomes a standalone drive for your computer, and your phone will no longer be able to see any of those files. That was fine during the Windows Mobile and early Android days. You’d plug in your phone, and it would essentially become a dead lump of a USB drive. Now though, we don’t want to lose access to our precious communication tools, even for a brief file transfer. That’s why Android and Windows Phone now utilize MTP. It comes with some drawbacks like slower file transfers, and you can only move one file at a time, but your phone wont be separated from its storage while connected to a computer. Given the trade off, I’d rather be able to connect my phone to my computer, and still being able to use it as a normal phone with all of my files and apps intact.
The iPhone just doesn’t work that way, so Apple doesn’t feel any great pressure to support other mobile device file management protocols. As far as they’re concerned you should be using iOS and iTunes.
Google did release an Android file manager program for Mac users which might work for you – http://www.android.com/filetransfer/
If that doesn’t work you might need to look at cloud solutions. The nice thing about Android, it’s silly easy to move files on and off via services like Google Drive, Box, and DropBox.
You could also do a local network sync via an app like AirSync –http://www.doubletwist.com/airsync/ or Air Droid – http://www.airdroid.com/ which will use your home WiFi network. It wont be as fast as a cable connection, but it’ll be faster than Bluetooth.
But yeah. Short story long, this is basically Apple’s fault.
Sometimes the cloud isn’t enough.
While I find it fantastically helpful to have a couple gigs up in the cloud, there are still times I need to have access to files locally. I might need files which are too large to wait for a download, or I might need to easily share files with a couple users around me. I might just be in poor coverage without access to WiFi. For as good as our cloud solutions have gotten, I find I often still resort to “sneaker-net” to move files back and forth between different computers.
This gets even more complicated when I want to interact with a file on a mobile device, especially those pesky iOS devices which lack proper file managers. You can’t just load up a movie file on an iPhone while out and about for example. Plugging your iPhone or iPad into a proper computer and dragging a file over without iTunes means that file wont show up in any of the apps on your iDevice. Sure, there are other workarounds, funnily enough using iCloud for instance, but none have the simplicity of a point to point transfer.
Kingston was kind enough to send over a MobileLite Wireless Flash Reader for me to play with. The dream of the MobileLite is to create a local wireless storage solution for multiple devices to utilize. Specifically up to three devices can log in and share the info on either an SDXC Memory Card or USB Flash Memory Drive.
MobileLite is a small grey/black brick about the size of two iPhone 5’s stacked on top of each other. It’s fairly light at 98 grams, and it comes with a USB cable to charge MobileLite using a computer or AC Adapter. Kingston also includes a MicroSD card adapter for those of you which pull Micro cards out of your phones, cameras, tablets, etc…
Continue reading “Review: The Kingston Digital MobileLite Wireless Flash Reader”