Using the W850i as a USB drive

The Sony Ericsson W850i has the ability to appear as a USB flash drive to your PC, so you can easily copy files from your phone to your PC and vice versa. You could even use the capacity of the Memory Stick Micro to carry files between work and home.

The W850i's hardware setup means that no drivers are needed to connect to any version of Windows since Windows 98, and it can also be used as a USB drive with Macs or Linux machines.

To use this mode, plug the supplied USB cable into your computer and the phone. The phone will ask which mode you want to use – File Transfer, Phone Mode or Print.

File Transfer mode makes the phone act like a USB flash drive, and is used by the Disc2Phone (Figures 1 & 2) and Adobe Photoshop Album applications.

Phone mode is used when you want to use the phone as a modem for your computer or synchronise your contacts.

Print mode lets you connect the phone directly to a Pictbridge-compatible printer to print your photos without using a PC.

For the best flexibility when moving files to and from the handset, choose File Transfer, and the phone will reboot into USB memory stick mode. Whilst in this mode, most of the phone features (including receiving calls) are disabled.

You can now access the phone as you would any other USB flash drive; on a Windows computer go to “My Computer”, and select “Removable Disk”, where you’ll find a set of folders for different types of content.

• DCIM contains the photographs taken by the phone.
• Music contains your music files, including folders for ringtones and VideoDJ
• Picture can be used to store pictures to view on the phone, or to show on a remote display.
• Other contains various other files
• Sports contains data from the pedometer including a spreadsheet of your training data
• Theme is for phone themes
• Video is for video clips
• Webpage contains saved web pages and bookmarks.

You can copy data to and from the memory card just as you'd move files around your PC. Remember to copy files to the correct folder (Figure 3) - if you're copying a theme from your PC to your phone, drop the .thm file into the Theme folder.

Ending the connection
Always stop the connection properly before disconnecting the phone; on a PC click the “unplug or eject hardware” icon in the system tray at the bottom right hand corner of your screen, then stop the removable disk. This ensures that all file transfers have completed (Figure 4).