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I'm trying to be a good consumer here and do plenty of research before I purchase, unfortunately it seems like either I'm not looking in the right places or the information isn't there. I'm considering purchasing a Samsung Note II or Galaxy III phone.

The problem apparently is that excepting cloud sync or mass storage devices, there's no way to make the Android Phone talk to my Kubuntu 12.04 system to sync calendar and contacts, and various other things.

I'm an eclectic person I scatter out quite a bit and google for all the wonder things it does, is completely useless for me and my particular lifestyle. Obviously I'm in the minority. What I need is (hopefully) someone who's already dealt with this and can provide steps to fix it or to be told to give it up as a lost cause and get either a hated windows phone or see if I can find an old Palm Pilot on Ebay and use my cheap flip phone for just phone calls.

Thanks in advance for any answers.

Thanks for the answers, transferring files is all well and good, but what I really need it to do is synchronize my contact and calendar data when I plug it in to my computer. Apparently unless I rearrange my life to use google contacts and calendar(which I'm not willing to do) this is not possible any longer with new technology, which is kind of sad. For an almost eight hundred dollar phone that does all sorts of wonderful things, the extreme lack of basic functionality is disappointing.

Marco Ceppi
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Drassx15
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2 Answers2

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I think you're missing out on an important change in how phones sync with PCs nowadays.

The past:

Phone  <-->  PC  <-->  Online mailbox

Nowadays:

                 _ .
Phone  <-->    (  _ )_   <-->  PC
             (_  _(_ ,)

In case you're wondering what it is supposed to be: it's a cloud.

there's no way to make the Android Phone talk to my Kubuntu 12.04 system to sync calendar and contacts

Please don't bother doing this the traditional way using a USB cable and buggy software to sync stuff. It's not how Android phones are designed to sync. Your options I see to go from here:

  • The easy way: Use Google Calendar/Mail/etc. and set up Kubuntu to use those (another question!)
  • The harder way: If you don't like the above because of sharing stuff with Google, you could work around this by configuring the IMAP mail server on your phone, create a small CalDav server on your PC, etc., or even set up a (very small installation) ActiveSync-compatible collaboration suite, e.g. Zarafa, Horde, and many many others etc.

I'm using both actually and since I'm using Android, I've never bothered setting up synchronisation software on my desktop ever again. It just syncs wirelessly, all the time.

For an almost eight hundred dollar phone that does all sorts of wonderful things, the extreme lack of basic functionality is disappointing.

This is the wrong site to discuss what phones can do. Please refer to either:

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gertvdijk
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  • in the end I went with an older technology that did exactly what I wanted it to do almost out of the box. The point was to simplify not complicate things, an old PALM II and a simple flip phone solved the situation. The Smartphone Idea was a nice dream but it's just a dream unless I choose to waste money – Drassx15 Jan 31 '13 at 20:10
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Android devices use the MTP protocol to talk with computers since Ice Cream Sandwich 4.0.

So these Ask Ubuntu questions may help you :

Community
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air-dex
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