Alternative to Samsung Kies

moody89

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Oct 6, 2009
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Just wondering if anyone knows of an alternative to using the Samsung Kies program to manage files etc. from your phone to your PC. My brother has the Samsung Monte S5620 mobile phone and he only wants to put a few songs and pictures from his laptop onto his phone. The only way Samsung provides to do this is by using their Kies software. Mass storage device mode on the phone won't work unless you have a dedicated MicroSD card installed which he doesn't (yet!). Normally, using dedicated software wouldn't be too much of an issue but this Kies program is possibly the most bloated, painfully slow piece of software I have ever seen for this purpose. For example these are the recommended system specs:

OS Windows XP(service pack2), Windows Vista, Windows 7
CPU Intel® Pentium 1.8 GHz processor or higher (recommended)
Minimum memory (RAM) size 1.00 GB (recommended)
Free hard drive space At least 500 MB
Screen resolution 1024 X 768 (600), 32 bit or above
Required software .Net Framework 3.5 SP1
Windows Media Player 10 or later
ActiveSync(Windows XP), Device Center (Windows Vista)
DirectX 9.0C

All he wants to do his transfer a few songs! Normally, there's the option of doing this within Windows Explorer but seemingly not with this phone. I've searched for alternatives to this program but can't seem to find any. I was just wondering if anyone knew of another way of doing this. In all likelihood, he'll probably get a MicroSD card soon so can access this from Explorer as a mass storage device. There must be someway around this though, surely! Cheers for any feedback!

UPDATE:

After even more searching around the internet for methods of doing this I eventually figured out a method of doing this myself. These are pretty straightforward steps, they were pretty much born out of the idea that somewhere inside the Samsung Kies program would be the drivers Windows needs to interact with Samsung mobile phones. That and a never say never approach ;) So with this in mind I thought I'd grab myself a copy of Samsung Kies and start having a look through it. I thought I'd share this info so here's a step by step guide:

1. Download a copy of the latest version of Samsung Kies here:

http://img.samsungapps.com/support/kies_win.exe

It's best if you save this to it's own dedicated folder on your hard drive.

2. I then needed a program that would extract the Samsung Kies exe file so that I could search for the relevant USB drivers. I used Universal Extractor for this which is a great little program that can decompress and extract files from almost any form of archive/self-installer. You can download a copy here:

http://legroom.net/software/uniextract

You can download the binary archive if you don't want to install or want the program to be portable. This is what I did but either method works.

3. Run Universal Extractor. It's pretty straightforward to use - you just browse to the archive you wish to extract in the top box. The extracted files will then be outputted to the location you specify in the bottom box. Note that when you select an archive it automatically suggests you output the files to a new folder in the same place you saved the .exe file. This is useful and I left it at this location. When you're done just hit OK and let it extract your files for you.

4. Navigate to the folder where your extracted files were stored. You should see a few folders at the top and a load of .ini files. To find the USB drivers, you need to browse to to the 'CabFile' folder and from there go to the 'USB Driver' folder. In here you'll see a file called 'SAMSUNG_USB_Driver_for_Mobile_Phones.exe.cab'. The .cab file will also need extracting - guess what we use for this!

5. You guessed it, we use Universal Extractor to extract the .cab file to a specified folder. You should now how to do this by now. Once you've done this open the folder that contains the extracted files and in there you should see 'SAMSUNG_USB_Driver_for_Mobile_Phones.exe'. These are the drivers that we need for our Samsung phone. It's probably best that you copy these to a dedicated folder to keep them somewhere safe so you don't have to go through this again!

6. Simply run 'SAMSUNG_USB_Driver_for_Mobile_Phones.exe' to install the drivers. When you're done you can plug your phone in, ensuring that it's still on 'Samsung Kies' mode in PC connections and your phone will appear under My Computer. From here you can copy, delete, move all of your files as if it were a removable storage device.

Just as a quick note, I have only been able to test this with the Samsung Monte S5620 mobile phone and Windows XP SP3. I am fairly certain it will work with any Samsung mobile phone that works with Samsung Kies and also on any version of Windows. However, anyone who does try this on a different phone or a different version of Windows if you could let me know here on this thread that would help.

I have no idea why Samsung didn't include these USB drivers separately from the start since it's a much simpler method of transferring files etc. and doesn't require any third-party software other than the drivers themselves. I guess they just want you to use their software but where's the fun in playing by the rules ;) I hope this helps those of you who, like me were frustrated by Samsung Kies and were searching for an alternative method of transferring your files to your phone. Comments and feedback are appreciated.