In this 3-part series, I will have a quick look at the way S60 handles the interaction with the more exotic computer OS: Mac Leopard and Linux.
We have already reported to you Steve Litchfield’s adventure on the other side ie his exploration of S60’s relation with Macs using a borrowed Macbook (part 1, 2, 3 and 4). Going even further than him, I decided to plunge down _not without asking a hundred questions before_ and ditch my 30-month old Toshiba laptop in favor of a spanking new Macbook (13″ screen, 2.4Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo, 2GB RAM, 160GB HDD).
Even though the first couple of hours were rough since I had never touched any Apple computer before, I eventually got used to the Mac way of things and was kicking into work in no time. But it isn’t until later that I finally decided to explore the interaction between my new computer and my beloved N82 and E71.
Helped to the max by Steve’s articles which were more than a good guide to kick things off, I decided to first explore the bluetooth interaction and synchronization. Things worked well except that I couldn’t get my Mac to accept any transfers initiated from my N82. In order to transfer something from the phone to the Macbook over bluetooth, I HAVE to browse the phone through the Mac, select the files and click Get. It’s not that big deal, but I now have to invert the way I work. Everything else works perfectly fine, EVERYTIME, and it was a refreshing move away from the sick bluetooth handling with the Toshiba stack, that sometimes decides not to turn on or not to accept my phone’s connection.
Since music and podcasts are a great part of my everyday life, the second thing I wanted to check out was music sync’ing. I have been an iTunes user for a few years now, and even on the PC, I never bothered with any other music player. I usually resorted to iTunes Agent to sync my S60 devices with my PC. On the Mac, I was glad to see that I didn’t have to use those tricks to make it work, since Nokia had a great solution, the Nokia Multimedia Manager. And the first time I used it, I was in heaven: this is how music should be managed, period. I can synchronize my Smart Playlists (a feature Ricky was disappointed not to find in the latest Nokia Music client), I am no longer limited to sync just one playlist, I don’t have to click a thing to initiate the sync, it handles videos and music simultaneously and it even converts videos to a mobile friendly version. If play count and ratings were handled on S60’s Music Player and sync’ed with the Mac, I would be having an exact replica of my experience with the iPod.
Another thing I tried to do is edit videos taken by my N82 through iMovie. I’m not as demanding for video editing as Steve Litchfield, so I was so excited to find out that everything was so easy and simple, and allowed me to get very professional-looking videos in no time.
I didn’t experiment a lot with iSync or with iPhoto, or a least I haven’t yet, though I tried both a few times and they worked well for my needs.
So far, my experience with the Mac was just great, and I was ready to swear that Nokias and Macs function better than Windows. Then I entered trouble land, and this is what I will discuss in the follow-up to this post, tomorrow.
[Image for this post and the series banner courtesy of Gilad's DeviantArt]
