One Insightful M*******cker

So I’ve recently signed up with Helio as my primary cell phone service. And, even though Helio’s Samsung phones have about the worst compatibility and support for Mac OS X, I’m stubborn and I’ll be damned if I’m not gonna use my new Fin with my Mac. This article details some of the hurdles I had to overcome to get my data flowing from my MacBook Pro to my Helio Fin. Hopefully it’ll save you some time. This first part covers bluetooth pairing and transferring of contacts from a Mac to the Helio Fin.

Disclaimer: The Helio Fin does not interoperate well with Macs. If you want a smooth, well integrated experience, may I recommend the iPhone. If you happen to already have a Helio Fin and Mac, then this guide is for you. I don’t work for SKTelecom (Helio) or Apple. I guarantee no level of service support for this article. YMMV.

Step 1: Bluetooth Pairing the Helio Fin with a Mac

One of the most critical things to do in setting up a new phone is getting your address book onto the device. My preferred method is via the Fin’s bluetooth connection.

Enabling Bluetooth on the Helio Fin:

First you must enable bluetooth on the Fin (it’s off by default). Do this by navigating to the bluetooth settings: Menu>[1]Customize>[7]Settings>[8]Bluetooth. Once in the bluetooth settings page, you must enable a couple different things:

• First, turn on Bluetooth: Select [1]Bluetooth Mode, switch to “on”, [•]confirm.
• You must also turn Visibility on: [6]Settings>[3]Visibility, switch to “Visible”, [•]confirm.
• You may also want to set the device name. This is also in settings, name it whatever you like

Now that Bluetooth is enabled on the phone, you’ll want to power cycle the device to ensure that the chip registers. Unfortunately, Helio phones don’t support Mac OS X’s 8 digit pairing passwords. To work around this, you have to use a third party application called iStumbler to pair the device. (go download it; I’ll wait).

Using iStumbler to Pair Your Helio Fin with your Mac:

In iStumbler with your Mac’s bluetooth turned on, click on the bluetooth icon in the lefthand column of the main window. Next, click the “Pair” button in the upper right corner. From here, you’ll be greeted with a pairing screen and (if you successfully activated the Fin’s bluetooth) your phone should pop into the list of visible devices to pair. Select your device and hit “Pair” to drop down the password entry sheet.

Enter a password that’s easy to type into the phone (1234) and hit enter. When you attempt to pair, make sure the phone is open and ready. Enter the same password in the phone when the request pops up. If all goes well, you’ve paired the Fin with your Mac. Open System Preferences on the Mac and go to the Bluetooth Prefpane (Hardware). You should now find your Fin in the list of paired bluetooth devices, listed as a Mobile Phone, not connected. Make sure to check “Show Bluetooth status in the menu bar”. Before leaving System Preferences, you’ll need to enable transfer to the Mac from the phone.

Click “Show All”, then go to the Sharing Prefpane (Internet & Network). Enable Bluetooth Sharing here by checking the box. Also setup any file receiving preferences; this will dictate how and where the files from the phone end up on your Mac. I recommend leaving the destination folder as your account’s Public folder.

Now that the Fin is paired and bluetooth is set up, you’re ready to start transferring data.

Step 2: Uploading Your Contacts from Address Book.

If you use Address Book.app to store all your contacts like I do, you’ll be sad to hear that the Fin does not support SyncML (and therefore iSync). Hell, the Fin doesn’t even support standard bluetooth file exchange! Despite my general technolust for the Fin, it irks me that Samsung didn’t build in such standard features into this otherwise great device. According to the Helio instruction book, you’re supposed to enter all your contacts into their online webmail and sync via the 3G mobile internet connection. Screw that!

Even though the Fin’s bluetooth is mostly useless, it still does support the bluetooth object exchange (OBEx) protocol. You can use OBEx to push data in both directions between the Mac and the Helio. Luckily, the Helio Fin does support standard vCard contact files; we’ll use this capability to load our contacts on the phone.

Exporting your contacts from Address Book:

1. Open a temporary folder in the Finder to store your vCards.
2. Open Address Book.
3. Select the contacts you want on your phone by holding the command (apple) key and clicking. Release the command key
4. Hold down the option (alt) key.
5. With the option key held down, drag the contacts sideways until you see the vCard icon under the mouse cursor. You should have a red star with the number of vCards you are dragging.
6. With the option key still down, drop the vCards into the temporary folder.

You should have a whole bunch of vCard files now. If you only have a single vCard file, it means you weren’t holding down the option key before you started to drag or you let go in the middle of the drag.

Transferring vCards to the Helio Fin:

Now that you have your contacts in a format the Fin will recognize, you can use bluetooth OBEx to transfer them. Assuming you’ve paired your Fin successfully, this part is pretty easy. First, you’ll need to put the Fin in bluetooth receive mode. To get there hit: Menu>[1]Customize>[7]Settings>[8]Bluetooth>[4]Send + Receive>[1]Receive Mode. The Fin should show a “Waiting to Receive…” screen. Go to your Mac and hit the bluetooth icon in the menubar. Under “Devices” you should see the name of your Fin. Go to this submenu and select “Send File…”. You’ll get a file browser window pointing to some random directory. If your temporary folder full of vCards is still open, you can go to this window, then drag one of the vCards to the file browser window. This will change the directory in the file browser.

Before you hit send, select all the vCards you created by band selecting or holding shift. Once you send the vCards the OBEx session will end, so select more than one so you don’t have to keep setting the phone to receive mode. I found that the transfer may fail mid way if you select a lot of files. If this happens to you, just resend the files that didn’t make it; or if you like you can send 15 at a time just to be safe. Once you’re done sending your vCards your Fin’s contact list should be filled with all your contacts!

One thing to note: while the Fin does support vCards, sometimes the data will become mangled for custom fields. I found that all the birthday fields became mangled in the transfer process. Phone numbers, though, generally make it across ok.

If you ever want to return the contacts on your phone to your Mac, you can OBEx them back. Hit Menu>[1]Customize>[7]Settings>[8]Bluetooth>[4]Send + Receive>[3]Send Contact on the Fin to get to the contact transfer page. When sending, your Mac should show up in the list of trusted devices because it is paired. No action is required on the Mac side to receive the files (depending on your sharing preferences), and you’ll find your vCards in your Public folder if that’s where you set the destination in the Sharing Prefpane. The names will be kind of odd, but you should be able to just drag them back to Address Book to re-import them.

In part 2 I’ll cover creating and uploading custom ringtones as well as loading media on the Helio Fin.