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@Nokia_Connects has loaned me a Nokia Lumia 920 to try out. This is the first time I've used a Windows Phone device for more than a few minutes. The Lumia runs Windows Phone 8 While there are a few things I don't like about WP8, I'm enjoying the overall user experience. It's refreshingly different than anything else and fast, fluid and, for the most part, very intuitive.

As a Linux user I wondered if it would be possible to connect the Lumia with my Ubuntu laptop and transfer photos, music, videos and documents back and forth.

Like Android 3.0 and later, Windows Phone 8 uses MTP (media transfer protocol) rather than USB mass storage for interfacing with a device's internal Flash storage, and with the SD card if the device uses one (the Lumia doesn't.)

At one time their were some issues with MTP support in Linux, but they seem to be mostly fixed. At least when when connect my Nexus S phone running Android 4.1 to my PC running the ancient, but still supported, Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, a Nautilus file explorer window pops up showing the phone's internal "memory card" and I can copy files back and forth between PC and phone. If I drop music files or videos anywhere in the Android phone's drive, the Android Media player finds and plays them with no issues. So it should "just work" with Windows Phone too, right? Well, yes and no.

When I connected the Lumia to my Ubuntu Linux box with a USB cable, as expected, Linux recognized the Lumia as an MPT storage device and opened a Nautilus window displaying the phone's pictures, documents, music, ringtones and videos folders (image, above). That looked promising so I tried copying various types of files to and from what seemed like the appropriate folders. The results were mixed.

Here's what worked:

• Images and Videos, Phone to PC: I could open my photos and videos on the phone using the Gnome image viewer or VLC Player and I could copy them to a folder on the PC.
• Ringtones: Full track .mp3 (but not .m4a) songs copied into the phone's Ringtones folder could be used as ringtones.
• Documents: Text files and Microsoft Office documents that had been saved with Microsoft Office and copied into the phone's Documents folder could be opened with the phone's Office app.
• PDFs copied to the phones's Documents folder could be opened using the free Microsoft PDF Viewer from the Windows Store.

Here's what doesn't work:

• Images, PC to Phone: Copying .jpeg or .png images to the phone's picture folder or any of its subfolders has problems. The copy seem to work, the phone could be disconnected, power-cycled and re-connected and the files were still on the phone. However the images were not not visible in the phone's Photos Hub gallery.
• Videos and Music, PC to phone: Videos or music files copied to their respective folders were not recognized by the WP8 Music and Video Hub media player either.
• Documents: If I created a document or spreadsheet with Libre Office or Open Office and saved in MS Office format, it could not be opened with the Office app, which claimed the document was corrupt! Office 2007 on Windows XP and Google Docs opened the "corrupt" files with no complaint.

I was able to find workarounds for all the problem file types:

• Video files, PC to Phone: Use Bluetooth. Videos in .mp4, .3gp, and 3g2 formats played on the phone when sent with Bluetooth. They could be found in the Photo Hub's Saved Pictures album and replayed from there. Videos in .ogv, webm, .avi or .mov formats that I tried failed to play.
• Music, PC to phone: Use Qlix (image, below), a small app intended to transfer music to Media Transfer Protocol (MTP) devices like the Microsoft's Zune. It's a bit primitive, you can't transfer whole folders of music in a single operation although you can multi-select files in a single folder for transfer, but it works and preserves song titles, artist and album names and cover art. Sending music to the phone with Bluetooth also sort of works. The tracks I sent played and were saved the Music & Videos Hub. But even thought files had ID3v1 tags with artist, album and title information, they where saved on the phone with the filename as the song title (Blue Highway.M4A for example) and with Unknown as the artist and track. There doesn't seem to be any way to edit the title on the phone or add the artist and album name either.
• Libre Office and Open Office Documents: Convert with Google Drive. Office on the phone complains that documents saved in MS Office format by Libre Office or Open Office are corrupt. But if you upload the documents to Google Drive in either MS Doc format or native ODF format and then download them from Drive in Office format, Office on the phone can open them.

It's all a bit kludgy, but by using a combination of USB, Bluetooth and Qlix I can move documents, music, photos, videos, and ringtones between my phone and computer. Which is as much as you can do with Microsoft's Windows Phone app for Windows 7 and 8 and apparently more than you can with a Mac.

Related Posts

A Linux User's Nokia Lumia 920 Review - Part 1: First Impressions and Google Apps Integration
A Linux User's Nokia Lumia 920 Review - Part 2: Using Dropbox With Windows Phone 8
A Linux User's Nokia Lumia 920 Review - Part 4 The IE10 Mobile Browser

@Nokia_Connects has loaned me a Nokia Lumia 920 to try out for a couple weeks. Here are my initial impressions. Warning, I'm not a Windows user. My desktop OS in Ubuntu Linux and I use an Android phone. But I was curious to try the Lumia to see what Windows Phone 8 was like and whether I could use it productively without a Windows PC.

Physically the Lumia 920 looks a lot like a larger version of the N9 or Lumia 900. The screen even curves down into the sides of the body like the N9. My Lumia is white and the hard polycarbonate body has a smooth polished surface that looks great.   It looks slippery but it's not. The smoothly rounded sides fit securely and comfortably between the palm of my hand and my curved fingers and I never felt in any danger of dropping the phone.

The Lumia 920 has a minimum of exterior ports and buttons. There's a 3.5 mm headphone jack, and slide out micro-SIM tray on top and a micro-USB charging and connectivity port on the bottom. There's nothing on the left side. The right side has three buttons: top to bottom they are the volume rocker, power-lock/un-lock button and a dedicated camera button. Except for the slide out SIM tray there are no visible seams or gaps any where on the phone. The 2000 mAh battery is not user replaceable and the Lumia, which has 32 GB of internal storage memory, doesn't support memory cards.

The Lumia's 4.5 inch 1280 x 768 px IPS screen is one the best I've seen on any phone. Blacks are really black and whites are pure and bright.  Colors are well saturated and accurate. The screen has a wide viewing angle, colors and detail hold up well when viewing the screen at an angle. The screen also performs really well in bright sunlight. The phone really cranks up the brightness in bright situationsand there seems to be some sort of very effective anti-reflective coating at work as well.

As I mentioned I don't use any Microsoft software or hardware. Until I got the Lumia I'd only spent a few minutes playing with Windows Phone. I expected to hate the Windows Phone OS but ended up enjoying the experience for the most part. High points were the the OS' stability and the responsiveness of the user interface. Transitions between screens and apps are very snappy and animations are buttery smooth.

The Windows Phone 8 user interface is refreshing different from Android, Symbian, iOS or anything else. The main UI element is the Live Tile, which can be a shortcut to an app or file or an animated widget displaying things like the current weather, upcoming calendar events or a slideshow of photos from your gallery.  Tiles can be moved and every tile can be re-sized to fit into a 1x1, 4x4 and 4x8 matrix. Although the interface is different then anything I was used to, it has the apparent simplicity and intuitiveness that are the mark of good user interface design. I was able to get up to speed with the basics of calling, messaging, email and the camera in just a few minutes without needing to look at the 16 page quick start guide, which is the only documentation packed with the phone.

I'm a T-Mobile user and the loaner Lumia was locked to AT&T.  I'm using a SIM from Red Pocket Mobile, an AT&T prepaid MVNO. Red Pocket uses different APNs than AT&T for data and MMS. Both APNs use a proxy.  Unlike with WP7, iOS and Symbian Belle, all of which hide or disable the MMS APN,  I was a able to easily enter all the required settings.

AT&T doesn't allow their pay as you go or MVNO customers to use their LTE network so I couldn't test the Lumia's LTE speeds. Using HSPA+, the Lumia 920 generally achieved data speeds of a little better than 6 Mbps down and 1 Mbps up.

In contrast to the openness of its APN settings, just about everything else  about Windows Phone seems tightly locked down.  Unlike with Android or Symbian the only way to install apps is through the Windows Store. There's no side loading  and there aren't any alternate app stores. There's also very limited access to the phone's file system.  There is no pre-installed file explorer and none is available in the Windows Store.  Third party apps can create and save files in their own private area of the file system but the only way to share files between apps seems with SkyDrive or other cloud storage.

I have Outlook.com and Skydrive accounts but don't really use them.  Cloud services I do use  include Dropbox, Gmail and Google Contacts and Calendar. I expected some issues connecting the Lumia with those cloud services but it went better than I expected with Gmail and Google Calendar and Contacts. I was able setup my Google account on the Lumia relatively easily. Here's the drill:

• Go to Settings > email + accounts > add an account > advanced setup
• Enter your full Gmail address and password when prompted and then hit Next
• Click Exchange Active Sync
• On the next screen enter m.google.com in the Server box. Leave Domain blank
• Press sign in and you are done.

In less than a minute I had all my email, contacts and calendar on my Lumia with real time push sync. It works great and the WP8 Email app does a decent job with Gmail.

Unfortunately, Google is shutting down their Exchange service to new users on January 30, 2012. Current users will be able to keep using Exchange on their current device, but after Jan. 30 new Windows Phone users will not be able to sync Google Calendar and Contacts. Gmail will still sync if you set it up as an IMAP account but it will use polling rather than push.

So far I haven't had much luck using Dropbox with Windows phone. There are a bunch of Dropbox apps in the Window store. I've tried a couple and they sort of worked but not well enough to really be useful to me.  I think my requirements for a Dropbox app are simple:

• The ability to download any file from Dropbox, save it on the phone and let me open it with the phone's default app for that file type; Office for text files, Gallery for images and Media Player for music and videos.
• For plain text files, regardless of their I file extension (.html, .css, .js, .php, etc.) I need to be able to edit the local copy and save the changes back to Dropbox.

Hopefully I'll find a Dropbox app that will let me do what I want. If you know of one please let me know in a comment.

Related Posts

A Linux User's Nokia Lumia 920 Review - Part 2: Using Dropbox With Windows Phone 8
A Linux User's Nokia Lumia 920 Review - Part 3: Transferring Files Between Windows Phone 8 and Ubuntu
A Linux User's Nokia Lumia 920 Review - Part 4 The IE10 Mobile Browser