Mac mobile phone superguide

• Article 40 of 53
• iCreate, September 2005
• View a PDF of the original article ~ 3.5MB

Page 1 | Page 2 | Page 3 | Page 4 | All 4 Pages

Amazing though it may seem, almost everyone now has a computer in his or her pocket. This computer is pretty powerful: we’re not talking a ZX81 here. It can access the Internet wirelessly, read your email, play music and videos, keep all your contacts and calendars within easy reach and much more. Have you guessed what it is yet? That’s right – it’s the mobile phone.

All this near-forgotten power is yours to tap into with the right tools. When we say “the right tools”, we of course mean your Mac.

It’s a great relationship. With, at most, a cable, you can use your Mac to get the most out of your phone and use your phone to get the most out of your Mac.

So in this article, we’re going to run through the basics of how to find a Mac-compatible phone, what you should look for and what you should avoid. We’ll run you through the basics of using your phone to connect your Mac to the Internet wherever you are. We’ll show you how to liberate all those videos and photos you’ve been collecting so that you can flaunt with all your other snaps in iPhoto. And we’ll show you just how much Bluetooth can improve your digital lifestyle if you just give it a chance. So lie back, relax, take the phone off the hook, as we run you through the marvels of Mobile Magic.

Not all mobiles are created equal. Some are more equal than others. Not all work with computers and there are a reasonable number – godforsaken wretches, all of them – that don’t work with a Mac. But that list is pretty small, fortunately. Pick a phone, any phone, and it’s liable to work with your Mac.

Of course, you might want a little more reassurance than that. So for the positively, completely official list of phones that work with a Mac, visit www.apple.com/macosx/features/isync/devices.html. If your phone is on the list, whoopee: you have an absolute guarantee from Apple that unless your copy of OS X is screwy or isn’t quite up-to-date, your phone will work perfectly well with your Mac straight away.

If not, don’t despair: it’s time to read the footnotes. Number one footnote is that the web page lists all the phones that work with OS X’s iSync utility. iSync synchronises your Address Book and iCal data with your phone’s calendar and address book. However, a phone may not have a calendar or may not work with iSync, yet may well offer other goodies that your Mac can still take advantage of.

Number two footnote? This is the list of phones that Apple has tested with OS X and found to work. There are others that haven’t been tested (and obviously ones that have been tested and don’t work. That’s a separate list that might have been helpful, Apple). If you have a new phone that’s basically an older phone with a different number and fascia, you might find your Mac works perfectly well with it. Even if it doesn’t recognise the phone immediately, there are usually very small bits of tinkering you can do within OS X to get it to work, usually just by changing the number in a text file. Space prevents us from listing all the hacks that have been invented to get particular models to work with OS X, but a quick search at www.macosxhints.com for your phone model will often yield results if it’s not on the official list.

So what sort of things should you look for in a phone to get maximum Mac enjoyment out of it? First off, pick a phone by a reasonably large, mainstream manufacturer that sells phones in the US. So, a warm hug to any handset from Nokia, Motorola or Sony Ericsson but just say no to Sagem and Samsung. If you can find out what operating system your prospective phone has, all the better: a Treo or anything running the Palm OS will work great; a Series 60 or Symbian phone is virtually guaranteed to work, potentially with a hack; Windows Mobile edition phones will need extra software from Mark/Space (www.markspace.com) as will any Pocket PC-based phone. Everything else is a bit of gamble.

For technology, Bluetooth is a definite. Even if you don’t have Bluetooth on your Mac, you can always buy an adaptor and get it up and running in no time and Bluetooth normally indicates a better quality of phone anyway. “Smart” features, such as a calendar, usually indicate the phone is on a slightly higher technological plane as well and will support more features that work with your Mac.

What definitely won’t indicate Mac-compatibility is a salesperson in a mobile phone shop. Usually knowing less about Macs than someone at PC World – which is saying something – anything they say will almost certainly be guesswork and unless you return the phone with 14 days, plan on an extended bout of “Did I say that? I don’t think I did. Can’t refund you then,” until resignation, depression or a restraining order set in.

If you’re in any doubt about Mac compatibility, do a search on Google for your phone model before purchase and include useful terms like “OS X” or Mac to see if anyone else has had problems or success with your intended.

We’ve already mentioned Bluetooth and this is by the far the best and easiest method for connecting a mobile phone to a Mac. If you don’t have Bluetooth, what are you waiting for? Surely any piece of technology named after a Viking has to be worth buying?

All you need for Bluetooth heaven is a D-Link DBT-120 USB Bluetooth adapter (available from the Apple store for £35): plug it in to a USB port and you have Bluetooth. Just like that. We recommend the D-Link adaptor because it’s the only one Apple approves and is the only one that works with Apple’s Bluetooth keyboard and mouse.

Once you have Bluetooth on your Mac, turn on Bluetooth on your mobile (it’s usually turned off by default) and ‘pair’ the two together (see Walkthrough One for more details on how to do that) using your Mac’s Bluetooth Setup Assistant. This roves around the place a bit: in Jaguar and Panther, it’s in your Utilities folder; in Tiger, you can access it from System Preferences’s Bluetooth pane.

If you’re still on OS X 10.1 or earlier or your phone doesn’t have Bluetooth, you’ll need to look at some other way of connecting your phone. You’re going to be languishing in a bit of technological chasm, unfortunately, since iSync only works with Jaguar or better and the vast majority of USB phones don’t work with Macs very well. Some do: Motorola phones are noticeably more likely to work via USB than via Bluetooth, for instance. There are also some hacks available to get certain models working with Macs, since most mobile phones use the same chip manufacturer for their USB hardware. If you already have a USB phone and it doesn’t seem to work with your Mac, visit www.taniwha.org.uk, scroll down until you find “Generic USB Cable Driver” and follow the instructions; you might be in luck.

But most of the time you’re going to strike out. Even with success, you’re better off with Bluetooth since USB phone connections are more prone to giving OS X spasms than Bluetooth connections.

If even USB is a stretch too far, there’s always infra-red. It’s slow, prone to failure, doesn’t work with iSync and has a maximum, line-of-sight range of about five centimetres, but if that’s all your phone has, that’s all it has. Unless you have an old Mac with a built-in infra-red port (we’re talking circa 1997 here), you’ll need to buy an infra-red adaptor for your Mac to get it work with your phone, though, at which point, you might want to start thinking of a phone upgrade and a new Bluetooth adaptor instead. Your choice though.

So you’ve got everything connected. What next? First port of call, where possible, is iSync. As we’ve already mentioned, iSync can synchronise the data in your Address Book and iCal with your phone. But it can also do a lot more. For one thing, you’re not limited to just one device. iSync can synchronise as many devices as you have, all at the same time. So your Palm Pilot, Pocket PC, iPod, mobile phone, .Mac account and anything else that has an iSync conduit (some conduits you’ll have to get from third parties) can all have exactly the same contact and calendar details on them at the same time. Update one and the next time you iSync, everything else will get the changes. iSync does carry over plenty of information, so don’t think you’re going to be wandering around with only half your address book: most Series 60 phones will even get your Address Book pictures carried over so you can see exactly who’s calling you. And if you take a picture with your phone and add it to a phone’s contact card, that picture will get synched right back to Address Book.

How you add these devices to iSync’s synchronisation list varies according to the software you have. In Panther, you can use the Add devices menu within iSync to add any recognised devices to your syncing schedule. If you have later versions of iTunes installed, you can add iPod synching from within that; otherwise, iSync will do it. In Tiger, however, you control .Mac synching from within System Preferences. All in all, it’s probably best if you’re lost, which might well happen, to use Help or Spotlight to find out where you’re supposed to add devices from.

iSync is occasionally unreliable so make sure to make a back up of your data every so often, just in case something goes wrong. But usually it behaves itself. Good iSync.

If you want to do more than sync your iApps, iSync is only slowly becoming more useful. There are some third-party programs that plug into iSync and add syncing between programs other than the iApps, such as Entourage, but these are rare and frequently badly behaved. But with the advent of Tiger, there’s now a standardised way for developers to add syncing capabilities to their programs. Microsoft, for one, has promised to release an iSync-compatible version of Entourage by the end of the year, and others are sure to follow.

If you’re confined to USB, your main other use for your phone is going to be Internet connections. If you’re out and about, the nearest Starbucks is miles away and your hotel phone line is more unreliable than a Microsoft software release schedule, your mobile is potentially your saviour. Plug the right settings into your Mac, press Connect and you’ll be jacked into cyberspace in no time. You’ll be sitting in a Travelodge, making cups of coffee from individual sachets, but you’ll be penetrating the corporations’ Black Ice before they realise.

It’s those “right settings” we mentioned that are the slightly tricky part. To use your phone for Internet access requires a little bit of technological know-how. Your Mac has a set of scripts for working some phones, but they’re a bit fiddly and are designed for dial-up rather than 3G or GPRS connections. There are far better scripts available at www.taniwha.org.uk, which is by far the most valuable web site around for Mac users with mobile phones. Find the set appropriate to your phone, download it and install it. Then read the Read Me on what to type into Internet Connect or the Bluetooth Setup Assistant (Walkthrough two shows you where you need to do this).

Speeds will vary. If you have a 3G phone, you’ve a broadband connection for your Mac right there – albeit it an expensive one. If you have GPRS, you’ve the equivalent of a home dial-up connection. But if dial up via your mobile of if you’re using infra-red for your connection? Think semaphore.

If you do get stuck with dial-up via your mobile, which will always work, wherever you are, as long as you have some kind of mobile phone signal, you will at least have the reassurance that it’s as simple to set up as a landline connection. Type your ISP’s phone number and your ID and password into Internet Config, press Connect and stand by for a complete lack of action. So try to minimise the amount of data you then try to download: use IMAP rather than POP for your email if possible, since that only downloads headers rather than the whole message; and turn off images in your web browser or use text-only versions of web sites. Otherwise, the Internet is going feel like pages from Ceefax.

GPRS and 3G are a lot better, for obvious reasons, and that’s what you should aim for if possible. With more or less the whole of the UK covered, except around tall buildings, the Mull of Kintyre, etc, it’s a good assumption to make that wherever you go around the country, you’ll be able to get a reasonable Internet connection. However, since GPRS-roaming is pretty much still theory rather than practice and 3G roaming is so science fiction, it’s up there with personal rocket packs and protein pills, you’ll need to reconfigure your Mac manually to use any mobile phone network abroad. Before you go, print out all the settings from www.taniwha.org.uk for the different countries you plan on visiting. Then, when you find out what phone network you’re on, set up a new access point on your phone with the appropriate settings and reconfigure Internet Connect to use this new access point.

If that all sounds like so much jargon, you’re almost certainly better off getting a taxi to that Starbucks: it might well be cheaper, too.

You’ve practically reached the limits of your phone if you’re lumbered with a USB or infra-red connection. But if you chose Bluetooth as your connection method – and blessed are the Bluetooth users – there are some extra things you can do with your phone using your Mac that will make you curse yourself for even thinking of using anything else.

If you’re fed up with mobile phone keypads, a Bluetooth connection will be a godsend. Once you’ve paired up your (supported) phone with your Mac, if you open up Address Book, you’ll notice there’s a new button in the toolbar. Either click it or wait until the little ants have stopped running across it and it has turned into three blue dots. Address Book is now connected to your phone. If you select a contact and click on the label next to a phone number, you’ll get a menu that allows you to dial it or send a text message to it on your phone. Type away, full speed, and laugh heartily at the poor souls labouring away with their predictive texters. Or something. It’s fun, anyway.

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.

Page 1 | Page 2 | Page 3 | Page 4 | All 4 Pages