Mac and Windows Phone 7

It’s great to see that Microsoft recognizes that a sizable portion of the market runs OS X, and it doesn’t want to leave them out of the fun. The Windows Phone 7 Connector let you connect your phone with yor Mac. The application is still in beta, but for people that have a phone with this operating system, it is the only solution available. Windows Phone 7 Connector works in similar ways as DoubleTwist with Android and Nokia Media Transfer with Symbian.

Windows Phone 7 Connector only lets you sync music, videos and podcasts onto your phone, copy photos and videos you’ve taken on your phone and update the Windows Phone 7 OS. You can sync your address book in OS X with Google Contacts and keep your phone synced that way, but you can’t do it over the USB cable. The same goes for your events and appointments. You don’t get any access to the Zune Marketplace, nor does it sync your downloaded applications. There’s no WiFi syncing support and there’s no system update support. It is in other words not a complete backup solution, and cannot be compared with the Zune software on Windows.

The connector software loads an agent when you start your Mac so it can open the app automatically when you plug in your phone. It also puts an icon in the Menu bar extras area so you can open the app yourself.

You can delete all the content on the phone from within the Connector, but be careful, as the option will delete all the photos and videos you’ve shot from the phone too, as well as media you have downloaded from Zune marketplace.

The Windows Phone 7 Connector picks up music, podcasts and downloaded videos from the iTunes library and photos and videos from iPhoto, so you don’t end up with multiple copies of files. For those of us that are used to work with Mac and iPhone, the functionality in the Connector is quite limited:

• Photos can be chosen by events, recognised faces and albums, but you have to take all the photos from an album or event! Luckily you can choose whether photos should be resized to fit the screen (which is the default) or copied full size.
• You can’t browse music by album name, just a list of artists with a sub-hierarchy of albums,  and, as with photos, you have to sync a whole album, rather than individual tracks. Even the search only finds artists and album titles, not tracks. The application cannot be used to transfer DRM-protected files from iTunes, and you have to convert lossless AACs to AAC in iTunes before you transfer them.

Hopefully these things will change in the finale version of the application.

The Connector syncs music information from the Zune service for things like the artist backgrounds that appear in the music and videos hub as you play different albums.

One last thing, the option to browse the device allows you to have much more control, as it lets you preview, import or delete items.

PS! Windows Phone 7 connector for Mac secretly supports the ZuneHD.