[SOLUTION] How to solve your connection problems with PC Companion or Sony Bridge for Mac

[bpresles]

When you put a lot of data on your Xperia S (I've for example about 24Go used on my internal memory), PC Companion or Sony Bridge for Mac will fail to detect the phone because they will time out before the phone is ready.

The culprit is the MtpApp process on the phone which takes time to get the phone ready soon enough when there is a lot of data on the internal memory, and PC Companion or Sony Bridge for Mac don't seem to be patient enough

The solution:

On PC with PC Companion:

1. Open a process monitoring app on the phone (like OSMonitor (see Google Play))
2. Connect the phone to the PC
3. Monitor the MtpApp process and wait for it to finish (i.e: stop using CPU time on the phone and disappearing from the top of the processes list on OSMonitor). Don't worry about the PC Companion error message about failing to detect the phone, just close it by clicking the OK button and wait for the MtpApp process on the phone to finish.
4. Once the MtpApp process finished, go in Start -> Control panel -> Hardware and Sound -> Device Manager
5. On Device Manager you should see the Xperia S or a device named "MTP USB" (or something like this) with a yellow exclamation mark. Right click on it and select "deactivate", wait for it to be deactivated (should display a bottom arrow on the icon), and right click again and select "activate"
6. That's it your phone should be detected.

On Mac with Sony Bridge for Mac

The following should only be done the first time:

1. Open Sony Bridge for Mac and go in Preferences
2. Deselect the option to start Sony Bridge for Mac when a phone is connected

This avoid Sony Bridge for Mac to start automaticlally and so too early before the phone is ready.

Once this done you just have to:

1. Open a process monitoring app on the phone (like OSMonitor (see Google Play))
2. Connect the phone to the PC
3. Monitor the MtpApp process and wait for it to finish (i.e: stop using CPU time on the phone and disappearing from the top of the processes list on OSMonitor)
4. Once the MtpApp process finished, open Sony Bridge for Mac and wait for it to detect the phone (it can take some time)

If the phone is detected as "Sony Ericsson Sony Ericsson Xperia™ NX" instead of "Sony Xperia™ S":

1. Go in your home directory (Users -> ) on the Finder, then go in the Library folder (on Lion, press and maintain the Alt key and go in the "Go" menu of the Finder and select "Library")
2. Once in Library, go in "Application Support" folder and delete the folder named "Sony Ericsson Bridge for Mac".
3. Then go back in Library and go in the Preferences folder
4. Delete the com.sonyericsson.Sony-Ericsson-Bridge-for-Mac.plist and com.sonyericsson.Sony-Ericsson-Bridge-for-Mac.plist.lockfile files. Then restart Sony Bridge for Mac, the phone should then be correctly detected as Sony Xperia S.

Hope this helps.

Message to Sony: You should really fix that connection issues, it's clearly not normal to have to do all what I described here to get the phone correctly detected by the PC or Mac.

[#2]

Hi Sam,

I think I found the problem with the MTP connection. First I run the antivirus and I found a worm that hide some files director on usb device, of course I delete it. After all I delete all USB device in administrator and delete PC Companion. I put on USB debugging and conect de Xperia S, Install PC Companion and miracle, everything is fine now and can eject safetly the device, but if I don´t use the USB debugging I Can Not eject it safetly.

Please post this solution maybe can help to all users

Best Regards

Marco

[sketchnsniff]

This is helpfull to some but to any average user… complete gobbledygook unfortunately.

For crying out loud Sony please fix this problem! For the last 6 months I've had this issue at least 50% of the time I try to connect, on two differenct Macs, all software up to date from all sides. Even when it does eventually connect it'll often fail later just sitting idle or when attempting a sync of media.

Come on Sony. Invest in some developers and QA engineers as this it totally unusable!