Mac mobile phone superguide
- Article 40 of 53
- iCreate, September 2005
Isn't it about time you started getting the most out of the computer in your back pocket? Rob Buckley guides you through the pitfalls of using a mobile phone with your Mac and offers advice on choosing the right mobile phone
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You can do things in reverse using Bluetooth as well. If someone calls you while you have Address Book open and connected, a window will appear onscreen with the caller details, number and so on. You’ll then have the option of logging the call, answering it, or refusing it – all from your Mac.
There’s more. Just about any phone these days has a camera built in. Are you going to leave all your photos on your phone and simply send them to your friends? No. You have a Mac, you have iPhoto and you want your pictures in your library. Particularly if you have one of those nifty Sony Ericsson K750s with their two megapixel digital cameras. They’re really nice.
With a Bluetooth phone, you can select any photo on your phone, and using the appropriate command (Usually “Send via… Bluetooth”), send it to your Mac. In a few seconds, your phone will transmit the photo wirelessly into… erm, somewhere on your Mac. The default location is obscured in Tiger and more obvious in Panther, but usually it’s in your Home directory and is called “Received Bluetooth Files”.
This file exchange works both ways, since you can send files to your phone from your Mac (see Walkthough Three). This may be software for your phone you’ve downloaded off the Internet or from your phone’s installer CD. It may be photos. It may be RealPlayer videos, since many phones come with their own version of RealPlayer. It may be 3GPP videos: QuickTime Player Pro allows you to export any video as a 3GPP video, which will play on most mobile phone video players; 3GP is the format many mobile phone cameras use for their own videos so you can upload videos from your phone and play them in QuickTime Player without any extra software.
There’s also software that gives new capabilities to your phone via Bluetooth. Salling Clicker, for instance, installs a small program on your phone that looks for a matching program on your Mac. If it finds it, you can use your phone as a remote control for your Mac.
The best thing about Bluetooth is that everything works together, provided the manufacturers didn’t get a little too creative at filling in some of the gaps in the standards. If you buy a Bluetooth headset for your phone, it’ll work with your Mac and you can use that same headset to make Skype phone calls over the Internet for example. If your PDA has Bluetooth but no phone capabilities, it can use your phone to access the Internet, send text and MMS messages and so on as well. Bluetooth printer? Print from your Mac, your PDA or your mobile phone. The more Bluetooth devices you get, the more useful Bluetooth will become to you.
Mobile phones are becoming more and more powerful with every year, as are Macs. But your Mac and your phone make an even more powerful combination. Bluetooth, iSync and other technologies now built into OS X make using the two together so simple it’s almost ridiculous. So pick up your phone and introduce it to your Mac: they’ll be the best of friends.
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