I learned today, as evidenced in my previous post, that I can easily transfer pictures from my LG phone to my iMac using Bluetooth. Since this was not immediately obvious to me, I’ll now share the steps I took for the benefit of all mankind.
First, I made the phone discoverable (Settings > Bluetooth Menu > Options > Discovery Mode > On)
Next, on my iMac I opened the Bluetooth System Preferences pane and clicked the “+” button at the bottom of my list of devices. After some searching, it discovered my phone and let me select it. At some point I got to a screen that implied the only thing I could do with this phone was use its Internet connection. False!
I ignored that screen entirely — in fact, I quit out of the setup wizard at that point — and went back to the Bluetooth System Preferences pane, which now included my phone in the list of devices.
Clicking the “gear” icon at the bottom of that list, I chose “Browse Device.”
There were my files!
It also looks like I could transfer new MIDI ringtones to my phone in that way, although like a civilized adult I want my phone to make a ringing sound when someone calls me.
Connected?
You can see that the iMac was somewhat conflicted about whether the phone was connected, but otherwise the whole thing went quite smoothly!
It didn’t quite work for me using a Samsung SCH-UY540 phone and MacBook running 10.4. I was able to connect the two devices, but not to browse files. It said the device (phone) did not have the needed services. I looked at some phone options and didn’t see any way to enable file transfers, etc.
I was able to use the address book exchange. With that I could send my phone list into the phone. For some reason it would only do one number at a time, but it was still a zillion times easier than typing them into the phone.
So thank you mysterious blogger who knows about Macs.