I’ll be reviewing Nokia Media Transfer for Mac. It lets you transfer pictures, videos, music, and more between your compatible Nokia device and Mac. I’ve been waiting for this software to come out since I started using Apple. I like the fact that now I don’t need to put my phone in Mass Storage mode just to transfer files and also the feature that lets me transfer random music with user-specified storage amount.

Download the latest Nokia Media Transfer.

After installing Nokia Media Transfer, using a Nokia device with a Mac just got cooler and easier. Integration with iPhoto and iTunes is seamless.

Connection with iPhoto

My iPhoto recognizes the connection after inserting the USB cable into my Nokia N95. I simply press the import button on iPhoto and any new pictures or videos will be imported. There’s even an option that allows iPhoto to delete the pictures on the phone after the transfer. If a duplicate is found, a pop-up asks whether you want to import the duplicate. It is even smart enough to show thumbnail comparisons of the two photos so you can see if they are really the same. An album in iPhoto is also available after the installation. Whatever picture you put in this album will be copied into your phone’s gallery.

Importing to iPhotos is so easy and simple.

Connection with iTunes

You can manually choose what songs you want to transfer to your Nokia phone or let it randomly choose for you. Under the Nokia Media Transfer’s device settings, you can specify a percentage of capacity to transfer random music. I put about 220MB of random songs from my iTunes library so that I still have enough space for recording videos. You can choose to put as much of the capacity you want. iTunes will randomly select the songs the same way it autofills an iPod shuffle. Maybe it’s time to get that 4GB microSD card…

Select how much music you want on your phone

Transferring music is so simple! Just click on the menu and click “Refresh Fill-Up Music.” The current songs on the phone will be deleted, and a new batch of random songs will be transferred to the phone. A progress bar shows up on the menu to give you an estimate of the time it will take.

The progress bar lets you know when it will finish.

Device Browser

Another feature is the device browser. It lets you do exactly what it means: browse files on your phone or the memory card. You can easily drag files in or out to transfer files. Before this program was available, transferring files on the Mac with my Nokia N95 can only be done through bluetooth transfer or by changing my phone into mass storage mode. Bluetooth is cool, but it is slow when transferring big files like videos. The disadvantage of mass storage mode is not being able to transfer files into the internal phone’s memory. Nokia Media Transfer fixes the shortcomings of both previous methods.

One thing that doesn’t make sense is that this part of the sofware is accessible on the second-tier of the menu under “Tools and Settings”. In my opinion, it should be directly under the main menu.

Conclusion

I’m an Apple fanboy as well as a Nokia fanatic. It’s great that Nokia finally came up with this for Mac users. It is useful and the integration with iPhotos and iTunes is pretty cool, too. There is one thing I did not like. Album Art is not transferred with the music. I know my Nokia N95 is capable of showing the album picture with the songs, but the songs I imported did not show any album covers. Since it is still in beta, maybe the developers are still working on it?