Today my wife received her new Samsung Note II phone --- exactly the same model GT-N7105 as my three-month-old phone. Hers is white, to avoid domestics, because mine is Titanium grey, but DOpus is blind to this obvious difference between them.
The following confusion occurs when I plug both phones into USB ports on my PC.
When I type "mtp" into the location box, the source panel displays two "Portable Media Players", both named "GT-N7105".
When I press a button with the command "Go /mycomputer USEQUALKEYS", the last group in the resulting display is "Portable Devices (2)", and underneath are two items, both named "GT-N7105".
Internet Explorer also lists two portable devices with these same identical names.
Yesterday I wrote a button for my grey phone with the command:
Go mtp://GT-N7105/Card dualpath mtp://GT-N7105/Phone new
It opens a new dual lister with the card on the left and the phone on the right. Unfortunately, this same command now works perfectly on the new white phone. When both phones are plugged into USB ports, however, I can't predict the behaviour. Also the phones don't seem to like switching between ports.
QUESTION: How to I write two buttons as in the example above, one that will open the white phone and not the grey phone, and one that will open the grey phone and not the white phone? I'm stuck because:
I cannot assign drive letters to the phones, as I can with portable hard drives.
I cannot rename the phones, as I can with portable hard drives, either within the phone's settings, or by clicking "rename" on the PC. (I changed the Bluetooth name, but this change didn't appear on the PC.)
I cannot gain access to the phones through the PC's "Disk Management" facility, as I can with portable hard drives, nor can I rename them in the associated "Device Manager - - > Portable Devices" facility.
Of course, the phones are not identical (they are not electrons), and in particular, they have different serial numbers. How can DOpus tell the difference?
If you open both phones at once you'll see that the internal path Opus uses for them does differ. For example, one will be mtp://GT-N7105/ and the other will be mtp://GT-N7105 (1)/. So you can distinguish between them and use them both at once. Unfortunately there's no way to currently control which phone gets which name, and the two phones won't be shown differently in Computer or in the Tree. We'll look at improving this in the future.
!. I connected both phones by USB.
(a) When I typed mtp into the location box and pressed "Enter", OR pressed the button "Go /mycomputer USEQUALKEYS", then two devices came up both named "GT-N7105" without any (1).
(b) In both cases, if I then clicked on one of them (the earlier grey phone) so that the two subdirectories "Card" and "Phone" were displayed, the path at the very top of the display said
\mtp ://GT-N7105
and if I then went back and clicked on the other phone (the later white phone), the path at the very top of the display said
\mtp ://GT-N7105 (1)
If I invoked the two-panel display using the button "Go mtp://GT-N7105/Card dualpath mtp://GT-N7105/Phone new", then there were no " (1)"s in the left or right paths at the very top, and the earlier grey phone was displayed. But if I then used the tree in say the left-hand panel to go to the card of the other phone, there was a " (1)" in the path at the very top for the later white phone.
I switched USB ports of the phones, and the " (1)" still referred to the later white phone.
I plugged in only the later white phone, and pressed the dualpane button above -- no subfolder display. I edited the command in the button, adding the suffix " (1)", and the subfolder appeared. So at least until reboot, the PC is applying the suffix " (1)" to the later white phone, which I did not have yesterday when I first created and tested the button.
I'll give up now. Clearly Samsung has been extremely lax in its programming by not caring about the situation when one household has two phones of the same model! If DOpus can somehow sort things out, that will be wonderful.
This may help or not, but I've got an Android phone too and when I plug it into the USB after turning on USB mass storage option, it mounts as a HDD letter in my computer. Not sure why you can't do the same thing. If there is no obvious reason, it may be worth checking out.
there seems to be a mac solution in the above link which is not much help to you. There is probably a solution in replacing the ROM with the custom Cyanogen mod, which is very good. Though you will have to check whether it remedies this issue and is compatible with your phone:
I don't think there is any ROM issue here. If you're seeing drive letters then your phone is not mounting via MTP, and thus nothing in this thread is really relevant as it's about how MTP handles two phones with the same name.
(Some phones have the option to mount as either MTP or as a drive letter, some don't and always want to mount as one or the other.)
Maybe you know better about this, but from (my admittedly far from expert knowledge) this functionality is the kind of of thing that can be changed with a different ROM. e.g USB Tethering. Depending on where you get your phone from, carriers may disable this feature on the custom carrier ROM that they ship out to you on your contract phone. This is because they would prefer to get cash of the feature as an added package than give it to you free.
Similarly it is possible that this issue might have been spotted and the mtp issue rectified in a different ROM.
However, if there is an easier solution (such as you have just provided) the point is academic, because changing your ROM is not a path everyone would want to take and it is a bit more work, even if the ROM is better than the stock.
Nobody makes money out of forcing you to use either of USB Mass-Storage or MTP, it's just a design decision made by some OEMs. There are trade-offs in both cases.
It's not worth flashing your phone OS to change from one to the other (there are much bigger reasons to stick with or change your version of Android or stick with what came with your phone), and this is all getting quite off-topic and not helping the original poster with the question the thread is really about (although, if the phone does offer USB-MS, switching to it would solve the problem another way, we've already established that I think), so let's leave it there. If you want to talk about Android USB-MS vs MTP in general, please start a thread in the Coffeeshop area.
Sorry, I don't think I worded my last post that well. I did mean not say that anyone made money over the mtp debacle. I was suggesting that it might have been fixed in a different ROM. The deliberate disabling & money comment was in relation to the example of USB tethering.
However, you are correct that this has gone very off topic and I don't think either of us has much passion for discussing the merits of USB-MS vs MTP beyond making our respective academic points.
I definitely think your proposed solution is the easier, more workable way to get this sorted, but in the (unlikely) event that this doesn't fly, it's nice to be aware of possible alternative avenues.
Interesting conversation --- clearly Android hasn't settled down at all yet. My Samsung Note II does not present the option of mounting as USB mass storage, and I won't be changing the ROM for a relatively minor problem, so the things discussed are of no immediate use to me.
Leo, thanks for the remark. What I described in my second posting already involved GT-N7105 (1) (with the necessary inverted commas). It seems that the labelling of my (older) phone as GT-N7105, and my wife's (newer) phone as GT-N7105 (1), is stable on both computers after reboot, and when switching USB ports (although no doubt I will do something eventually to confuse the phones or computers or both).
Three further questions about MTP have emerged, which you are at liberty to transfer to another topic if it is more appropriate.
FILEDATE: I have used MTP to transfer files to the phone from my HP 32-bit Windows Pro PC.
The filedate (date modified) remains unchanged on my PC screen.
When I use the Android ES File Explorer, the filedate is the date copied. The "Properties" explicitly say that this is the date modified.
When I use MTP to view the file on my ASUS 64-bit Windows Home Premium Notebook, however, the filedate is also the date copied.
The PC and the Notebook have exactly the same DOpus setup, which I copied across. Similarly, if I use MTP or GoodSync to copy files from my PC to the phone, the PC shows the original date and the Notebook shows the date copied. This means that syncing on the Notebook using GoodSync is impossible, because it wants to copy all the files all over again.
Now the big discovery. If I use MTP to copy a directory onto my PC (old filedates), then just open and view that directory on the Notebook, the filedates are all updated to the date copied, even when I plug the phone back in to the PC!!! (Shades of the old .eml problem with Live Mail.) What on earth is going on here, and how can anyone sync phone and computer properly with this sort of confusion?
FOLDERS ON MTP: Copying and deleting files using MTP is OK, but creating copying and particularly deleting folders takes forever and hangs DOpus for a while. It just doesn't seem comfortable.
EJECTION: There is no "right-click, eject" for the phone in the lister, and no "Safely remove . . ." in the system tray. That seems very dangerous. Besides stupidly pulling out the phone in the middle of a large file copy, could there not be other invisible processes going on? For example, should one close DOpus before pulling out the phone?
Not sure, but maybe the same thing happens in Windows Explorer and the phone just has a delay when doing some actions?
MTP doesn't need ejecting. Once an operation says it is finished, it is finished.
Please start new threads for any other questions or follow-ups to these questions. This thread is about "How can I distinguish two identical phones?", so anything that doesn't fit that subject is better off in a thread of its own, please. Then people searching can find answers more easily, and we don't have to keep track of multiple parallel conversations in one thread. (And and all the other reasons mentioned here.)
