Nokia home network, but better; Using SymSMB with Macs and PCs

I love my Nokia Symbian phones, I had an N80 and then an N95. I tend to use my phone as my primary camera which means it gets a lot on it. I like to sort through these on my Mac because it’s really hard to tell which ones are blurry, even on the N95′s screen.

The problem is that I’ve never got the ‘Home Network’ feature to work with my Mac. I like the idea of the Home Network, other than the obvious lack of authentication and the restriction to one home network. But, if I can’t get it to work it makes no difference. However, a company called Telexy Networks seem to have the answer to my problem with SymSMB. SymSMB is a Samba server that runs on your phone. It runs on S60 3rd edition too.

What I especially like is that they have a number of features squarely aimed at people with more than one network (I’m talking to you, Nokia. It’s a mobile phone). You can set a number of users with various permissions for each share. There are also a number of connections that connect the server to a particular network. These can be started manually or automatically when a network becomes available. I think this is incredibly powerful. Wifi is a very draining resource, so the standby of the N95 has been improved to manage it. If the access point connection is controlled by the user simple daemons like this one can use what is available when the user makes it so without constantly polling for a connection and draining the battery.

Update: I just noticed Telexy have a promotion on until 01 June, 2007. If you buy SymSMB 1.10 for $5.98 you get a free upgrade to SymSMB when it’s available. Pretty good deal for the price of two cups of coffee I think.

Important Update: I wrote an update on SymSMB 2.0 which supersedes this. It looks awesome.

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Productivity, mobile, symbian, s60, s603rd, nokia, n95, n80, symsmb, telexy, home network, samba, smb