First I tried it with a cable – the official one, the very one I got with the phone. Windows did recognize the newly connected device, but disconnected it again right away, and it went on like that over and over. On top of that, every time it was recognized, the phone showed the very first screen you see when it boots up,
so I thought the phone was restarting, but that was not the case. All 3 animations did play (the one with the phone’s name I already mentioned, then O2 Welcome and then Samsung), just like when the phone starts, but the phone’s uptime did not reset to zero and simply kept counting. Over Bluetooth I could not transfer anything either, because even though the phone was connected (as Win showed me), the furthest I got was the message “No device ID is given“.
It did occur to me to change the phone’s ID, but I figured that would surely be nonsense, since the phone already had a name set, GT-5363 or something like that. That day (May 13) I also tried to transfer the data – about 15 photos – through various sync services. But alas, for Android there was no SkyDrive client straight from MS, so I tried only these:
- Ubuntu One – let me tell you, it was an absolute nightmare. Not downloading the app to the phone, but installing the Win client.
I downloaded a roughly 25MB package, installed it and wanted to sign in. However, when I could not sign in with any of the three e-mail addresses it could have been (and for one of them I even tried to reset the password, only to be told that they had no such address in their DB), I gave up. And the worst part was that the wizard had 4 steps, yet each step took at least half an hour to load. - DropBox – does not support automatic downloading to the phone when new files are added to a folder, and it probably does not even support selecting multiple items at once. So you can download/export only one file at a time, which was useless to me when there were 15 photos. I ruled out DropBox as well.
- Google Drive – Another outright disappointment, much like DropBox. The app did not show me a single file, not even when I clicked the only button there was, “Load files from before December 31, 2011“. It just showed me the subfolders of the root and nothing else. And I could not make the folder as a whole available offline either – the app is apparently still very much unfinished, given that half of the things in it are grayed out.
- Box.Net – Has no client for Windows, so I tried to map my Box.Net drive as a network drive, but again it somehow did not work. I guess it was just a bad day. So I gave up on it for the time being, figuring that things would look better in the morning.
And sure enough, today (May 14) I renamed the phone to “K” (originally I wanted to call it “T”, but that might have clashed with the name of my father’s PC on the network) and suddenly everything started working. The only thing is that I installed some Bluetooth software on the phone and now the phone drains the battery far too much, so I will probably try uninstalling it and see whether it keeps working. Now I can browse the contents of the whole memory card from Win and work with the files freely, just as if I were working with ordinary folders on the PC.