Good morning.

Question: Is MorphOS capable of recognizing/accessing a mobile phone? At least, the included memory card?
So far I cannot see any devices on my Ambient...

Thanks!

> Is MorphOS capable of recognizing/accessing a mobile phone?
> At least, the included memory card?

A decade or more ago, this worked flawlessly with my ancient Sony Ericsson W810i. When I connected the phone via USB cable to the Pegasos/Mac and switched the phone to file transfer mode, the phone's memory card got mounted as a USB mass storage device with read/write access.

Hm, using smarphones this no longer seems to be valid.
Or can anyone else report something different...?

Quote:

Maybe you can be a bit more specific as well ? Today each vendor often comes with its own suite of backup/access tools alongside the phone. USB access mode is anything but "generic" nowadays for many "smartphones" ...

I have an Android 7 phone and I can access it, but there are couple weird things to note.

- I have configured Android's USB access mode to "Copy files" (or whatever it is in English), but not as "Copy pictures (PTP)", but still it seems to be recognized under ptp.class on MorphOS/Poseidon... it gets mounted anyway, so I haven't inspected more.

- The phone mounts as a drive, which contains two directories, one for internal storage and another for the SD card, but for some reason these directories are empty if the phone was locked/blank when connecting. I'll have to unlock the phone and then connect the cable before it turns the display off.

- For some reasons the mounted drive doesn't show up in the Ambient desktop, but it's still accessible via My MorphOS, Shell, DOpus, etc. I'm not sure if I'd "put away" the drive icon from desktop myself for some weird reason or is this standard behaviour... should inspect sometime :)


But if you can't access the phone by physical means, maybe there are software/network based solutions to transfer files... one not-yet-available candidate is SimpleTransfer. I asked about MorphOS version from the author and I got a test version, which seems to work between my phone and MorphOS machine. Maybe more people could ask about it and give some pressure to make a public release ;)


EDIT: I also think that you need to have USB debugging mode turned on on the phone that it works with MorphOS. I tried to turn it off now and it didn't mount anymore (at least without rebooting or any deeper tests). Now it mounts again when I turned it back on. Hard to remember what steps I might have made originally to get it to work :)

[ Edited by jPV 13.02.2022 - 14:11 ]

Quote:

I run OrangeFTPd on my MOS machine and connect with an FTP client from my phone. Works everytime. Connecting the phone through USB sometimes work, sometimes don't.

USB: Depends on phone-type:

HTC/Huawei: no problems - internals SD-card is bound to masstore.class an appears on Ambient as MOS-device.
Samsung: you have to set ptp.class in Poseidon. In most cases it works.

Anyway: On Android USB-debugging and Unknown-sources must be set.


If nothing works (USB, FTP, etc.) you may read sdcard with external reader,connected to your MOS-machine.


[ Editiert durch Amigaharry2 13.02.2022 - 14:33 ]

Yeah, an usb phone connection is already quite outdated anyway.

With the recent steps to implement wireless charging, the connector will be removed along with SIM and SD card slots, which provides the feature of making the devices water proof.

I am personally just using ipads since 2010 and it is just way easier to transfer data and photos using a wifi connection and a local samba or ftp share. Beside the required activation of the first ipad, I never connected any apple device via USB for other reasons than charging.

The "Documents" app is your friend here.

Investing time to create some fancy protocol that works for some phones, while other break the rules and need extra coding is not worth it, anymore.

@jPV

Thank you very much for your hints and describing your experiences. Even under Windows I have to change the mode from transferring pictutes to transferring files. And so I did it under MorphOS as well, but so far I could not see any drives on Ambient. But now, with your hint, I will definitely give it another go! :)

@geit

Sorry, I completely disagree!
An USB phone connection isn't outdated, it is the usual and common way of transferring files - at least for non tinkerers.

I do not want to transfer pictures or videos via WLAN if it is not necessary. Just like most of the other compter users, I simply want to connect my phone with the USB cable and transfer files - that's it. And I think, an OS should offer this service, just like accessing an 'ordinary' SD card.