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Sometimes USB isn't an option:

The USB interface on my old Samsung Galaxy S2 broke (seems to be a common problem), now the connection just charges, data transfer is borked under Windows and Linux.

So I thought it would be "easy" to use WLAN for that - Samsung itself wants you to use "Kies", proprietary software which works only under Windows. Once I had located the right old version for my apparently-too-old phone, I started to back up my photos. But Kies decides to be super-duper-slow and downloads with 1 kb/s, so it predicts about 48 hours of copying.

Luckily there's sftp on the play store, with that and scp under Fedora it took 5 minutes.

It's like they want you to hate them.



You can't blame the (quite old) phone for being difficult when one of the main interfaces is broken. And there are many apps that let you explore your phone via wifi instead of using Kies. Just searching "wifi file transfer" or "wifi file manager" gives you plenty of hits.


Are you serious? Because the phone is 5 years old it's reasonable to expect transfer speeds from the 1950's?


No, because the 5 year old phone is broken.


I used https://www.airdroid.com/ for that; it gives you reasonable, LAN-speed downloads.


Just for file transfers, I really like SuperBeam. It does just one thing, it's really fast (the WiFi direct connection is fantastic) and the PC software is just a file that you run, no installation or other crap necessary.


I'll check it out, thanks! AirDroid is a first good-enough solution I discovered, but it has way more features than I need - you can tweak and manage your mobile device from the web browser in all kind of ways, but the only thing I use is downloading/uploading files.




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