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I am looking for a smartphone which I can easily use as mass storage device.

Preferably without installing extra drivers, Kies or other extra software. I am using UMS for playing audio/video files (which are stored on the smartphone device) directly on desktop PCs, for batch copying/extracting/converting (eg. using foobar2000), or for simple drag and drop.

Some serious candidates were these smartphones so far:

  • Samsung Galaxy Note Edge
  • Sony Xperia Z3 (oder Z3 Compact)
  • Motorola Moto X Play (oder Style)
  • Samsung Galaxy Note 4
  • OnePlus 2
  • OnePlus 1
  • Samsung Galaxy S6
  • Lenovo Zuk Z1
  • LG G4

I tried to activate UMS on my Samsung Galaxy S3 but it never really worked out, so I hope with one of these (or similar equipped) smartphones there is UMS already built in.

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  • All those you mention (as well as the S3 you have) come with this support out of the box. IOW your problem must be one of configuration (probably on the PC side).
    – Stefan
    Commented Oct 22, 2015 at 13:41
  • there is no "support out of the box" for the S3. Only MTP is supported. For UMS you need to root the device and install extra software.
    – Herr_Schwabullek
    Commented Oct 23, 2015 at 7:26
  • @Herr_Schwaullek: Ah, UMS is indeed problematic in general (you can't export via UMS while having that same partition also available in the phone at the same time, for fairly deep technical reasons), which is why MTP is used instead. You're probably better off trying to get MTP working on the PC side.
    – Stefan
    Commented Oct 24, 2015 at 13:38
  • I don't have any problems with MTP. But in some cases UMS is superior to MTP so it would be nice to have native support or at least no problems to activate it on a smartphone.
    – Herr_Schwabullek
    Commented Oct 25, 2015 at 15:22
  • As I said, there are fundamental limitations in the use of UMS, mostly the fact that you can't let a PC access a partition via UMS while that same partition is mounted locally (unless both access are read-only, but I don't know if this exception is well-supported by the Linux kernel), so it's pretty much always problematic (typically, you'd have to first unmount your SD card, then export it via UMS, and when done, stop the UMS export and re-mount the SD card; and for most other partitions, unmounting is nigh-on impossible because there's always some part of the partition that's in active use).
    – Stefan
    Commented Oct 25, 2015 at 19:46

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