Connecting your Sony Ericsson W300i to your PC

By USB

This phone is built for music so it is very handy that it comes in a box with a USB cable to connect to your home computer or PDA and some useful software, additionally the USB cable can charge your phone while you work.

Important note: The W300i has two distinct modes when connecting to another computer – called Phone Mode and File Transfer mode.

The first time you try this select File Transfer mode (Figure 1).

As soon as you plug your phone into the PC through the cable Windows XP will recognise it as a mass storage device. You see it as a removable drive in Windows Explorer. You can then simply transfer music files to your phone by dragging and dropping from your music directories.

Try loading the software that comes with the phone onto your computer. The first package is called Disc2Phone. It only works with the USB connection and allows you to either find music files from your hard drive or rip them from CDs and load them onto your phone.

• Click on the My Music bar to select other sources.
• You can drag and drop whole directories, playlists or individual files using the Add button and clicking the Transfer button (Figure 2)
  

Tip: If you have a large collection of music then arrange it into playlists, or your music management software to generate playlists like “Most listened to” or “Not listened to lately” to the size of your memory chip (the default size is 50-70 tracks depending on the sampling rate). This means you can simply load a playlist onto the phone every day rather than having to think about what you want – and then delete it the next day.

Now disconnect your phone and reconnect it again.

• This time select Phone mode (Figure 3).
• Run the other package that came with the phone Sony Ericsson PC Suite

This works with both the USB and Bluetooth connections. The top half of the window covers synchronising your phone with your personal organiser software, such as Outlook Express.

• Select Sync manager
• Settings button

You can select what you want to synchronise and select the files to synchronise with.

Be warned, if you synchronise the address book with Outlook you will get a very full address book as it will upload all the numbers – including supplicate, with their email addresses.

Your Outlook calendar will synchronise according to the settings you will find in “properties” the default is 30 days back and 90 days forward.

• Close up and select Synchronise now (Figure 4)
  

The bottom half of the window has other programmes. The most useful is “Sony Ericsson File manager”. This allows you to move files back and forth from your computer and your phone by Bluetooth, either by cut and past or drag and drop.

The Sony Ericsson file manager will not just move music but will also move pictures and video.