To some, the idea of connecting a Windows Phone to a Mac seems a little wrong somehow. One eloquent colleague recently described me syncing a Windows Phone 7 device to an iMac as “like a monkey mating with a camel”. Microsoft isn’t overly keen on its products mixing with Macs either, and has yet to release its excellent Zune Windows Phone 7 management software on the Apple platform.
In my opinion, there’s nothing wrong with a beautiful mobile phone hooking up with a beautiful desktop computer and sharing themselves with each other–regardless of their different parentage. If you too, want to connect a Windows Phone 7 device to a Mac then fear not: it can be done!
All you need to do is download and install a piece of software called Windows Phone 7 Connector (developed by Microsoft itself, incidentally). This simple, free utility allows you to sync music, photos, videos and podcasts from your existing iTunes and iPhoto libraries to your Windows Phone 7.
When you plug your Windows Phone 7 handset into your Mac, you’ll be invited to set up and personalize your phone. Here you can change the name of the device, download the latest OS updates and change some of the default settings.
There are a number of different syncing options within Windows Phone 7 Connector. For instance, you can choose to automatically sync whenever the device is connected to your Mac, import photos and videos from the phone to your Mac, and grab music metadata from the Zune service.
You can sync your entire iTunes music library (including playlists) from your Mac to your Windows Phone 7 phone, through a neat iTunes-esque interface. Videos and photos from iPhoto can also be synced, providing you’re running iPhoto 09 or higher.
Select the Browse Device option and you’ll be able to examine the entire contents of your Windows Phone 7 handset. You can preview images and video, and import them to you Mac if you so wish.
