SymSMB gives access to smartphone data for PCs over WLAN.

Finally mobile phones running on Symbian OS receive an SMB-server.

The connection from the mobile phone to the computer is set up over TCP/IP on WLAN. The list of supported phones includes a number of Nokia E- and N-Series. In addition, this software can work on phones of other makers as long as they run Symbian S60 3rd Edition operating system.

Symbian file system uses Windows likes scheme to refer to different drives: C:\ is for Flash-memory and RAM, D:\ and E:\ are for expansion slots and Z:\ holds the system data. SymSMB only allows sharing the whole drive, not just a folder on it. As with Windows, it is not easy to access a shared drive because the user needs to know the exact name of the share. Still not all the folders are accessible over remotely. For instance, some system folders are not accessible.

Although our test was run with Nokia E60 over 54-Mbit WLAN connection, the data transfer speed was slow, never reaching above 300 Kbytes/s in either upload or download direction. Partly, we could not rename or delete files on the smartphone from the computer. Probably, the filenames are not allowed to contain spaces.

Those who only want to conveniently organize their MP3 collections on the phones would be served by connection over USB or Bluetooth better than SymSMB. Free data managers can be also used to access the file system, even if only directly on the smartphone.