At Google I/O this year I was lucky enough to receive a Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1, one of the latest Android tablets to ship with Android 3.0 (Honeycomb). However, being a Samsung item it does have its downsides. Samsung for some reason known only to themselves have endowed it with Samsung Kies, a synchronisation utility which requires a piece of proprietary software to run on your PC or Mac in order to transfer files over the USB cable. Kies is actually a layer on top of MTP (Media Transfer Protocol). Samsung introduced MTP in earlier versions of Android and with the Galaxy Tab 10.1, there is no other way to transfer files over USB.
So I downloaded Kies for Mac, a fairly recent release, and although it knew there was a Samsung tablet plugged in to the USB port, it stated that the device was ‘unrecognised’ and therefore refused to let me do anything with it.
Not to worry, Kies for Windows appeared to be a more mature product and had been updated very recently, so I installed it in a Windows XP VM. After having to apply a number of updates to Windows that too refused to work although the problem appeared to be USB driver related. As an aside, the Windows software appeared very buggy, crashing several times whilst I was, in essence, doing no more than navigating through its menus.
Back to the tablet. Scratching my head I found that the new Google Music application suggested a third option – selecting Help provided me with a link to a ‘free Android File Transfer application’ for the Mac. This was duly installed and singularly failed to detect the Galaxy Tab. Sigh.
The last throw of the dice came with an email from my friend Steve who said he’d heard that XNJB would work. I installed this, and after a few false starts I established a process that would get it to work most of the time. Here’s a step by step guide (please ensure that debug mode is not enabled before you start):
- If it isn’t already on, turn on the Galaxy Tab and unlock it.
- If the desktop/home screen (call it what you will) is not being displayed, press the home button to get back to it.
- Plug the Galaxy Tab into to the Mac (if you have bluetooth turned on you’ll see a dialog box warning you that Bluetooth will be disabled, you must answer Yes to continue).
- The Galaxy Tab will go into ‘sync’ mode and display a USB connector on screen.
- Run XNJB, it will connect automatically to the Galaxy Tab.
Unfortunately at the final step I sometimes get a ‘no devices found’ message from XNJB. Unplug the tablet, quit XNJB and try again.
Once XNJB connects to the tablet you will be able to upload music and other files, download files, and also delete remote files. Make sure you use the XNJB ‘disconnect’ button to disconnect the tablet when you are done. If you want to subsequently reconnect, disconnect the tablet from your computer, quit XNJB and start again at step 1 – I was unable to get XNJB to reconnect using the ‘connect’ button once I’d disconnected.
Now Samsung has committed a number of unforgivable sins here.
First and foremost there is no way of mounting the internal SD Card on a PC in the traditional manner. This is probably at least in part because the Google I/O edition is a WiFi only model with 32Gb internal storage and no external SD card slot. But that shouldn’t stop us from doing it, after all the file system is structured to have an ‘SD card’ at /mnt/sdcard if you look at it with, for example, AndExplorer.
Second, Samsung are, intentionally or otherwise, making it very difficult to actually move files between the tablet and a Mac. Their own software isn’t distributed with the tablet, when you get it, well, it doesn’t work, and third party software is patchy because of problems that appear to reside within Samsung’s implementation of MTP. We can only hope that the official implementation in Honeycomb 3.1, due soon, is more reliable.
Third they are using a proprietary ‘dock’ cable very similar to that used by Apple for their mobile devices, so I am unable to travel with a single USB cable for all my devices. Now I could get over this but for the final problem: the Galaxy Tab will only charge when plugged in to its own dedicated charger.
This appears to be related to the fact that the charger puts out 2A whereas a regular USB port can only supply 500mA. Plug your Galaxy Tab into a computer and it will helpfully inform you that it is not charging – by putting a tiny white cross over the battery level indicator. Now from an electronics design point of view there is no reason why that should be the case. If plugged in to a computer the Galaxy Tab could have been designed to charge slowly (as opposed to more quickly with the dedicated charger) but the fact remains that it will not charge – at all – except with its own mains charger. A spare mains charger from Samsung, with cable, is £31 on Amazon, and the data cable by itself can be bought for £7.
I’d be more understanding of Samsung except for the fact that I’ve been using the original 7″ Galaxy Tab since October and although the software on the new device is better (Honeycomb is a big improvement over Gingerbread), it retains all the annoying proprietary flaws (software and hardware) of its older, smaller sibling. With one exception – I get to choose if I have to use Kies, or if, alternatively, I want to mount the SD card as a drive over USB. Much more sensible.
This is all bad news because for a non-tech user the experience will be one of irritation and frustration – “why doesn’t it JUST WORK!”. The Galaxy Tab is, in hardware terms, the closest anybody has come to providing a device that can challenge the iPad on a level playing field but Samsung have scored a big own goal by making the synchronisation experience unnecessarily complicated and counter-intuitive.
As an aside I’m now reading that the connection problem is widespread on Macs and showing up to a lesser extent on Windows. I’m about to perform a factory reset on my Galaxy Tab, I’m hoping it will continue to connect to the Mac afterwards.