So whenever I get a new phone, it seems the first thing to annoy me is that I need to plug it in to transfer files.

Generally, it’s not too difficult, but sometimes it’s nice to be able to access the phone’s SD card whenever I need to dump something on it.

I think the first time I came across the idea of using SAMBA on a phone was back with my Nokia N80i. Measly and slow as the phone was, it did however have great ability where it lacked in speed. To be honest I have no idea what it was called, but it was there, and was quite useful – when the phone’s WiFi worked that is.

Next I went to the iPhone 3G 16GB which was predictably ‘Apple’, and therefore did not possess any way whatsoever to transfer files other that those supported by iTunes. Once I was jailbroken, I searched and found another version of SAMBA for IOS – which worked great.

Finally, I got my Google Nexus One last year, and low and behold I found the cable to transfer were easily bumped and broken, causing transfer problems. So again, SAMBA to the rescue! It took a fair while to track this one down due to Android being in it’s infancy, but one morning one of my mates noticed it and it nabbed it!

Initially I had to stick with the beta edition which was admittedly buggy and underfeatured, though over time it has become very stable and it does pretty much everything I expected and more. Cheers to JimmyChingala on xda-dev for porting it to Android!

Here’s the link for SAMBA for Android on xda-developers. You can get the latest and greatest developer builds there, or if you just wanted the normal version, search for ‘SAMBA’ in the Android Market or use this link to the market website.

I should note also that it requires a rooted device; if you don’t know what that is, then you probably won’t understand SAMBA anyway.

That’s it for now until I get around to making up another topic of discussion.

Who knows? Maybe I’ll get around to syncing my Media drives automatically and i’ll report back (no promises :D)

 

Derryn