How to copy files to your mobile phone card (Sony Ericsson) on linux (Fedora)

I’ve mentioned in my Sony Ericsson W810 review how you needed “disc2phone” software to get your music on your walkman phone. What I didn’t say is that pretty much same thing is happening for every other files. Copy speed would be too great, once the transfer is done, and you have umounted (safely removed) the drives (memory card and phone) files you just copied wouldn’t be there.

Once I tried copying a movie (.avi ~700MB) to my phone memory card, and that movie was on Windows machine, and transfer dialog said it would take around 90minutes. I thought about it, how really fast (slow) phone memory cards are, since they aren’t really made for freaks (like myself) that would just like to carry .avi movies on them. So producers really didn’t think about speed when it comes of transferring such large files.

Hack

Tonight, I’m testing some large number of games for phone want to write a review of top games for mobile industry right now. So it was usually about transferring ~50MB for some 150-200 games. Transfer, umount, unplug … no games. But when I have situation like this, I don’t give up, I just keep on going, even if days are needed until problem is fixed :)

So this is my hack for this situation.

After you’re done with transfer do not just do the right click > Safely Remove.

For some reason it’ll umount it right away, and wont do the right way. What you need to do is:

Open Konqueror, in address bar type system:/media (some systems system:/devices) and there you right click on both your card and phone > Safely Remove

Or go to System icon on your computer, then “My Devices” then right click on both your card and phone > Safely Remove

Or you can do this in console with umount if you’re a GUI hater :)

You’ll need to wait for some time (remember the movie situation 90 mins …), well the bigger your file is the more you wait, just wait and it’ll umount itself, just let it be. Later on if it’s just taking too long (10-20 mins) for 50MB files, you can use the “Safely Remove” from your desktop.

I’m not sure what goes wrong when you do it from the desktop, because it should be a “shortcut” link to the same thing you do in console, but … whatever :)

This will also work with Music! So no more need for disc2phone, unless you really want to. If I find any bugs in this solution, I’ll post it so far so good.