Jenn has a pay-as-you-go cell phone, while its a relatively inexpensive phone (Samsung M300) it has reasonable battery life, and its small. One of the unexpectedly useful features was a camera, sure its not able to take very nice photos but sometimes your phone is the only camera you have handy “in the moment” (like when the kids go on a mud-puddle adventure).
Unfortunately with the pay-as-you-go plan, there wasn’t any way to get the pictures off the camera. No data service meant you couldn’t email them from the phone, and the phones bluetooth connectivity seems to be limited to headset profiles. The data cable was cheap enough on eBay so I thought I’d take a risk and see what could be done with one.
Once I had the cable, it was time to find some software. BitPim seemed to be the right choice for me (free, and available on Linux). The Ubuntu repositories have a version that works [sudo apt-get install bitpim].
You’ll want to run it as root, or mess with the /dev entries for USB to grant your user enough rights to access the phone. The BitPim software handles the capabilities of the M300 in two ways, treating the one phone as effectively two devices. The first is the “media” version, this allowed me to copy down the pictures from the phone. The PIM version needed a bit more fiddling as it wasn’t actually detected properly. I did manage to get it to download the contents of the phonebook from the phone.
Now it turns out that the Bell Mobility firmware for this phone seems to be different enough from the US version that BitPim simply won’t work for writing to the phonebook. Someone else ran into exactly the same problem as I did. Of course, this was after I managed to delete all 60 phonebook entries that were already stored in the phone. Oops. I think Jenn has now forgiven me.
I’ll reference the excellent HowardForums for all your cellular information needs. And a pointer to a Samsung page which provides a data access utility (that sadly still fails with the firmware I have).
Your tip about running with sudo bitpim got my phone detected by Bitpim, thank you!
What could I do with the /dev files to get permissions set for the USB device so I don’t have to sudo bitpim each time instead of just clicking it from Accessories?
USB under Linux is a bit confusing.
I think this thread may be a solution to your problem.
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=901891
If you get it working, please post a follow-up comment indicating it. For my needs, I rarely use BitPIM enough to bother fixing my USB to be easier.
Help! I have an M300 (from Bell), and I got a USB cable for it, that seems to work. However, I’m currently using Windows 7, and I can’t get any driver to work with the phone. (And thus, BitPim fails to detect the phone.)
Windows detects a “SAMSUNG CDMA Technologies” device, but fails to install the driver. I’ve downloaded drivers from 3rd party sources, from the Samsung website, and even a driver through the Windows 7 troubleshooting tool!
While my situation is different than yours, do you have any recommendations on where/how to get drivers for this phone with Windows 7?
Any help would be greatly appreciated. I’ve had this phone for years, and there’s photos on it that I want to download — but as usual they’re holding my data hostage!
You might try simply using a “liveCD” version of Linux to sort this out as it may be easier than getting the Windows drivers sorted.
I’d suggest you check out the BitPIM help site
http://www.bitpim.org/help/howto-windowsusb.htm
http://www.bitpim.org/help/phone-samsungsphm300.htm
Another place to get help is the HowardForums http://www.howardforums.com
Thank you for the reply.
I dug out some obscure posts on howardforums, and on some other sites as well. I was able to find links to the new Samsung mobile->PC software (though they are nearly unreachable through normal navigation of the Samsung site, which is beyond garbage in terms of ease-of-use and design). While the software didn’t work, and there were more errors than I could count, I was able to get some usable drivers that finally allowed BitPim to access my phone.
I made a post in case others may have to do the same in the future:
http://www.howardforums.com/showthread.php/1692288-Samsung-SPH-M300-and-Windows-7-%28Drivers-%29
Glad you got it working and thanks for sharing your solution.