Sony Ericsson USB Cable Driver for Mac OS X

After buying Sony Ericsson k750i, was (sadly) excited by the USB cable included in the box and the prospect of using my Sony Ericsson’s card reader interface with my mac .

This didn’t last for long though, as Mac OS X does not have a driver for the cable and there isn’t one on the CD included with the phone. After searching high and low on the Sony Ericsson website and Google I found that Sony Ericsson do not make OS X drivers for using their phones with macs and it seems no-one else has bothered to make one either, most Sony Ericsson “hackers” and the like seem happy with their phones bluetooth capabilities. Without a driver the cable merely functions as a charger.

However I eventually found mobile.feisar.com which explains that most of the USB cables are based upon the Prolific PL-2303 USB-Serial chipset, for which there is a driver for Mac OS X Tiger available for download on the Prolific Technology website

Notes

This driver enables the use of the card reader functionality of most Sony Ericssons, so that OS X mounts your phone’s memory stick to your desktop as an external drive. You can then import your photos directly into iPhoto, as well as download or upload any files directly from or onto your phone’s memory stick. Please note however that this driver only enables access to the phone’s memory card and not it’s internal memory, so you cannot access your calendar or contacts, or synchronise your phone with iSync. The USB cable is therefore no replacement for bluetooth in that respect, but you can send contact details from Address Book on your Mac to your Sony Ericsson by exporting a vCard for a contact or group of contacts (via the File menu), either directly to your phone’s memory stick, or locally and then copying the vCard onto your phone’s memory stick.

Directly accessing your Sony Ericsson’s memory stick on OS X with Finder will unfortunately cause Finder to leave behind folder setting in “invisible” .DS_Store files. This is normal, Finder does this in all folders but you don’t usually see them in Mac OS X because it hides them by default. Your Sony Ericsson on the other hand does not hide them, so they can be a bit of a nuisance in File Manager. Luckily there are a good few programs around that will delete all the .DS_Store files in a given location. Out of the one’s I’ve tried, the best and most professional seem to be DSWipe and AppleOff, but there are many available.

Instructions for downloading and installing the driver:

1. Go to Prolific Technology website by clicking on this link.
2. Download the Mac OS X PL2303 driver by clicking on “md_pl2303H_HX_X_dmg_v1.1.0b1.zip”.
3. Unzip the file, making a folder called “md_pl2303H_HX_X_dmg_v1.1.0b1?.
4. Go into the folder and double click on “PL2303_1.1.0b1.dmg” to mount it to your desktop.
5. Double click on “PL2303_1.1.0b1.pkg” inside the disk image to install the driver.
6. Restart your mac for the new settings to take effect.
7. Plug in your Sony Ericsson Phone to your Mac using a Sony Ericsson USB cable to mount it’s memory stick on your desktop.

Requirements

The basic requirements for use of the driver are:

• An Apple computer running on Mac OS X
• A compatible Sony Ericsson phone
• A Sony Ericsson USB Cable

The driver has been tested on and reportedly works on following Sony Ericsson phone models on Tiger:

• w600i
• k750i
• k800i

The driver has been tested on, but did not work with the following models:

• k700i

Finally the following models are reported to mount as external storage devices in OS X without the installation of any driver or third party software:

• K610i
• w810i
• k800i

If you successfully use the driver with a different version of OS X or a different model phone please comment on this page with the details so that they can be added to the list. Thankyou