I managed to successfully sync up my Samsung A670 phone with my WinXP desktop today. This is important to me because I’m planning to get a new phone and I needed some efficient way to transfer my contacts and pictures between the phones.
First thing you need is a USB cable. You can get one on Amazon for around $20, or you can try eBay and get one at a bargain price. I got mine on eBay, and it came without the official software package. The seller included some burned CD inside the package, but hell if I’m going to use the software some dude slapped on a CD for me.
The second thing I did was getting the drivers from the Samsung website. I installed the drivers, connected the device and went through the standard device detection dialogs.
Once you get the device working, you will need some software to connect with the phone. Once again, without the official CD I went for the open source app and downloaded BitPim.
BitPim lets you interface with a wide range of CDMA phones from Samsung, LG and other manufacturers. It has some really cool features allowing me to export my contacts in some different formats including csv. So as long as my new phone is either CDMA based and compatible with BitPim or has a native import feature for csv files it should be really easy for me to make the switch.
BitPim also downloaded all the pictures from my camera, so that I no longer need to email them to myself, or directly to my Flickr account.
You can aslo use BitPim to upload new ringtones onto your phone. I don’t think my A670 supports mp3 format, but your phone might. BitPim will help you convert and sample the mp3 file into a qcp file that is more compressed and CDMA phone friendly. It uses a 3rd party app to do the actual conversion, so you will need to download Qualcomm’s PVConverter and dump it somewhere in your Path in order to get that feature working.
I was unable to play the converted qcp files, but once again – this is most likely because my phone sucks. I had no problems playing the same files with Qualcoms player (it can be downloaded from the same page as the converter).
[tags]samsung, a670, pc, bitpim, sync, drivers, qcp[/tags]