It’s all about SONY :-( *sigh*
Has Sony learnt nothing from dodgy techno-social experiments like ATRAC and SonicStage? Good grief. The latest so-called Walkman phones come with proprietary “Disc2Phone” software for transferring music from your PC or Mac.
Why? Excellent question my friend.
When you connect the phone to your PC via the supplied USB cable, it looks like a USB storage device; you should just be able to plug the phone in and use your file explorer of choice to drag and drop files into the phone’s memory or storage card. This is as complicated as it needs to be.
Sony, we don’t want more programs installed on our systems just for transferring files between devices.
Unfortunately the “Playback failed” bug that I (and many other owners of SE mobiles) reported only seems to be fixed by using Sony’s Disc2Phone software to transfer files between PC and mobile.
And of course it only comes as a Windows installer, despite the alleged “PC Suite” software. (It definitely doesn’t install on my Ubuntu desktop which happens to run on a PC.) So now I find myself maintaining a Windows machine simply to move MP3 music files and podcasts to my telephone. Well … not maintaining it exclusively for this, but you get the picture…
Also, pity help Mac users unless you’re running some form of Windows virtual machine, like Parallels. No Mac software to be seen.
Similarly, the latest TTR Gadget of the Week is the new Sony B100 MP3 player & music recorder… looks like a great little unit, and at least they’ve done away with ATRAC, but you still need to use proprietary software (SonicStage) to copy/move files.
Helloooo Sony: we DON’T NEED PROPRIETARY SOFTWARE to move files around! It’s cumbersome, slow, feature-bloated and unnecessary. And you forgot the right-mouse-button support. Again.
The “Ericsson” half of the SE-combination is doing a great job. It’s a beaut little phone. But Sony, however, is really letting the side down.