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Cartwright?

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Nov 18, 2011
18
0
Quick question, does iPhone offer mass storage mode when connected via USB to another device? And if it involves app usage, will it still allow access to Music or is it strictly iTunes or iPhone playback only?

Thanks in advance.
 

FreakinEurekan

macrumors 603
Sep 8, 2011
5,561
2,614
It doesn't do it natively. It will show up as a USB drive for accessing your photos & videos (read-only) but that's it.

There are some apps that give you access to storage space but it is sequestered space, e.g. you could stash some files and retrieve them but you couldn't access any of the existing files on the phone. Basically turns your iPhone into an oversized, expensive thumb drive. Makes about as much sense to me as a Thanksgiving turkey made out of Spam.

Alternatively there's a program called iExplorer you can install on your computer and get access to data on the phone, but of course that requires admin privilege on the computer:

http://www.macroplant.com/iexplorer/

Depending on what you want to accomplish, apps like DropBox are handy.
 

Cartwright?

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Nov 18, 2011
18
0
Thanks for the reply, I figured they would not allow it. Stash drive is a nice feature, but that would mean duplicating the data if we want to access both on the iPhone and on the "stash" partition. Unless there was a way to sync the iPhone's internal storage with the "stash" partition.

What I was hoping to accomplish was to simply access to my music using USB interface in other computers & devices without having to install anything. I think I have been spoiled by the openness off other platforms, where I could simply connect and store/transfer music, videos, pictures, etc.. But that's fine.

Currently I am using my blackberry to connect it to my car via USB and access all the songs in there using radio's interface. I heard some people managed to use iPhone's USB cable and access music. I am referring to BMW specifically.
 

Givmeabrek

macrumors 68040
Apr 20, 2009
3,464
1,161
NY
Currently I am using my blackberry to connect it to my car via USB and access all the songs in there using radio's interface. I heard some people managed to use iPhone's USB cable and access music. I am referring to BMW specifically.

You can access your music using most cars USB interface. You can also do it with the cars bluetooth connection. Works fine on my Lexus. No problem with that.
 

Small White Car

macrumors G4
Aug 29, 2006
10,966
1,463
Washington DC
Currently I am using my blackberry to connect it to my car via USB and access all the songs in there using radio's interface. I heard some people managed to use iPhone's USB cable and access music. I am referring to BMW specifically.

This is really a totally different question from your original post. Most car manufacturers have built in support for iPhones and it has nothing to do with how the phone behaves when plugged into a computer.

I don't know if that BMW can play iPhone songs over USB, but I'd say the odds are very good.
 

Cartwright?

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Nov 18, 2011
18
0
Thanks, yes but that was just an addition to what I was trying to accomplish, which is to be able to simply turn iPhone into Mass Storage.

I checked around a bit, yes, it turns out you can use USB cable and access the music on iPhone. Streaming via bluetooth is completely different, all it does is just plain stream it with only Next/Previous functionality. I don't think any phone offers browsing playlists, or going into folder structure, unless it is wired via USB.
 

matthewscott661

macrumors 6502
Jun 27, 2009
327
4
Chicago
I use an app called Phoneview that allows me to download all the messages, notes, voicemails, etc, to my computer and it has a feature for storing extra things on the phone as a disk. I don't know how well it works and it's going to have the same situation as others of not being able to access the things from the phone.
 

kvizzel

macrumors 6502a
Jan 15, 2011
559
6
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_3_3 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8J2 Safari/6533.18.5)

Are you jailbroken?

There's a tweak for that.
 

Cartwright?

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Nov 18, 2011
18
0
I don't own one yet, so I'm not jailbroken, but I can possibly consider that if there is a tweak for that. :)

Without being jailbroken, can we store xls/pdf/doc files in the iPhone and attach them to the recipient?
Alternatively;
Would it work if we use iCloud? Can we attach files from iCloud or DropBox? (Not link to the file, but actually the file itself)
 
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