Vista’s Windows Mobile Device Center (WMDC) was a step in the right direction, but I was always having problems with it. Sometimes it would recognize my device and sometimes it wouldn’t.

With Windows 7, Microsoft has taken the same tactic as with many of the other applications that were built into Vista: WMDC is not included when you install the operating system but you can download it. However, unlike with Windows Mail, Messenger, etc., you don’t have to go out there and hunt it down. Just plug your device (in my case, my Samsung i910, a.k.a. the Omnia) into a USB port on the Windows 7 machine and – depending on your Windows Update settings – it will automatically download and install both the drivers for the phone and the latest version of the Windows Mobile Device Center. Momentarily, you get the happy news shown below:

Then it opens WMDC and connects to your device. No muss, no fuss.

You can set up the device to synchronize it with your computer, or if you just want to transfer a file (such as photo you took with your cell phone camera) to or from the device, you can connect without setting it up.

You can browse the contents of your device’s built in storage and any memory cards that are inserted, as shown below, using the familiar Windows Explorer interface.

Unfortunately, Explorer’s thumbnail view of folder contents doesn’t seem to work with the files on the phone. You just see a generic icon for jpg files, as you can see below.

Now that would be a useful feature, so I could easily identify which pictures I want to transfer from the phone to my computer. The good news is that if I do know which one I want, I can just drag and drop it from the device to my computer desktop (or vice versa).

Of course, if you want to just import them all, that’s a straightforward task.

You can tag them when you import them (for instance, to identify them as photos from the cell phone) and you can even select to automatically rotate vertical photos when they’re imported. How cool is that?

I’ve been using the WMDC in Win 7 for a while now and it has proven to be, so far, more reliable than the same software in Vista (but then so has most everything else). Performance is also faster, but then maybe it’s the new hardware that should get the credit for that. :)

deb@shinder.net    www.debshinder.com