sony ericsson works on mac shock
Nice to come across a Mac friendly phone such as the W800i or K750i that supports many of the OS X's publicised connectivity features straight out of the box. There are a few others that require a little coaxing to get going many of which can are helpfully catalogued on Mobile Feisar.
It's pretty straight forward to get
However some holes are evident in the way these phones integrate with OS X. Wireless net surfing, using the phone's built in Bluetooth modem, requires some work as the necessary modem control scripts aren't supplied. Once you are able to locate the correct modem control scripts then it will be necessary to set this up in System Preference's Network configuration windows (Initial tests prove successful - however, ensure that your network has granted you access to a GPRS user and password.
If you ever find yourself connecting either the K750i or W800 to a Mac, it is here that the difference between OS X and Windows workings will become apparent. If you use it with both operating systems, you will notice that Mac will store temporary 'DS_Store' files (which are usually invisible) in each directory you access. While not a problem on Mac, this will potentially cause some unexpected behaviour on Windows, or even render some files invisible once the phone is disconnected. The freeware application FinderCleaner performs the necessary filesystem ablutions to remove these files before your phone is unmounted.
While we are on the subject of disconnecting and unmounting, brings the biggest flaw of this SE pair to the forefront - on a standard USB unmount, this will bring the whole OS X come crashing down in an unceremonious heap! Quite a serious software flaw here - there are workarounds hosted on Mobile Feisar, but to think that one of the leading mobile phone manufacturers have managed to ship two flagship products with such glaring software flaws make us despair of the levels of QA that have been applied...
This entry was posted
on Tuesday, October 11, 2005 at 8:22 pm.
