SymSMB, mounting and exporting Windows shares on the N95

Here is one clear reason why Symbian is such a powerful OS for your phone. The N95 has a wide range of possibilties to communicate with other equipment. A wide range of third party software extends these capabilities even further to webserving, ftp, ssh, telnet, vnc and more. SymSMB 2.0 is one of those applications. A very useful and nifty one. It allows you to export shares to a windows network and it can copy data from shares within this network to its flash memory or the card drive. So let's have a look:

The capabilities

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The first thing one notes is that it does not do a real mount of external shares. You can copy within the SymSMB applications files from an external share to and from the phones flashmemory and the SDmicro memorycard. As such you can not search through large files or play music or video from external shares. A real pity. 

Exports of directories in the flashmemory and the memorycard however are real exports and can be opened as a real share on a remote machine. This works under Windows XP and other SMB/CIFS supporting OS systems. It tested out OK under XP and my Dell Axim Pocket PC running Windows Mobile 5. Shares can be configure to automount/export when a connections is made to a certain network. Access to the exported shares (read or write) is configured per user. It works both in a domain as well as for a momentary point to point mounting using ip numbers.

 
The manual and configuration of SymSMB 2.0

The manual seems well written and readable. Since it is very easy to configure SymSMB I actually did not read much of it, but the parts I read seemed clear and simple. In no time I had SymSMB configured for my home and work network.

 
Communication speed

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I did a quick test, copying some files. There is some variance in the results, I did not do long term copy actions and timed them with a stopwatch. I just copied some simple multi MB music files and watched the transferrate in Connections of my N95. Here is an overview of the results:

• Copying under SymSMB from the N95 card to my PC's windows share, 150-190 kB/s.
• Copying under SymSMB from the PC's windows share to the N95, about a 100-120 kB/s
• Copying under Windows from a N95 shared directory to my PC's main drive, 180-220 kB/s
• Copying under Windows from the PC's main drive to a N95 shared directory, 310-350 kB/s

As you can see SymSMB is a significantly slower than the N95 in USB mode, which is around 900 kB/s in both directions. it is also slower than a download with the webbrowser on the phone which is about 500 kB/s.
It shows that transferring large files is might not be really interesting over the wifi network.

 
Conclusions and usability remarks

All in all the software is a nifty piece of programming, which allows you easily transfer or access files to and from your corparate file server or your home PC. The transfer speed is a bit slow, making  it is most useful for smaller files. Luckily when talking office documents, pdf's and others these in general are in an acceptable size, especially if you would like to read them on your phone.

This is however not true for media files. A nice movie can easily be 500 MB to a GB large. And transfering such a file from a PC's share to the phone before playback is not practical. I would like to see SymSMB 2.0 to be further developed to truly mount external shares visible for the phone's OS or add media playing capability to the SymSMB copy application. I want to hookup my N95 to a TV or stereo and playback A/V media from my favorite file server. 

Sharing the phone's media to a PC is workable. The transfer speed however is not enough to playback the highquality video's recorded by the N95 video camera. These require an average  of 365 kB/s. But a quick test with a encoded mp4 (from a DVD) at 175 kB/s (1400 kbit/s) played back smoothly via an exported share from my phone on my PC. Note that 1400 kb/s is about the maximum bit rate for a mp4 video to playback at 640x480 pixels at 25 fps on the N95's tv-out. Playing Mp3's from a phone share is no problem at all, since they require a much lower bandwidth than video.

However if you only want to exchange files between a file server and your phone using any (free) ftp client/server for Symbian might do the trick at most likely higher data transfer rates since the protocols have less overhead. FTP speeds from a server to the N95 may be expected to match that of a browser download ( ca. 500MB/s). So wether this application is worth the $25 in its current state is up to you. In any case Telexy is a company to watch since this product shows they are capable of producing userfriendly, smart and stabile software. I am looking forward to their next project. A PPTP capable vpn-client for S60 3rd edition might not be a bad idea to complement SymSMB. Allowing users secure access of their data files through the phones 3G network.

Visit their site for product information or to check out more about transfer speeds in their publications and their user feedback forum.