Transferring Files Between my Nexus 7 and my S2

I was recently traveling.  I loaded up my phone and tablet with videos.  I have the 8 GB model, so I could only fit a few videos on it.  Normally it is not a big deal, but in this scenario, it mattered a little more.  Due to a family emergency, I had to be dropped off at the airport at 7AM for a 1PM flight.  My initial plan (before realizing how much time I was going to spend at the airport) was to use my phone to shuffle the videos around.  My Galaxy S 2 has a 16GB Micro-SD card that was loaded with videos.  The phone and tablet are Bluetooth linked to each other, but it turns out Bluetooth file transfer is really slow.  I was averaging about 120 KB/s.  That is about 100 minutes per video.  That is not exactly fast enough to shuffle videos around.

I decided to look into Wifi Direct.  The S2 comes with Wifi Direct built in.  I found a Wifi Direct app for the Nexus 7.  The two different apps would not communicate with each other.  To be fair, I didn't give it a whole lot of time, but I didn't want to spend my battery life figuring out how to watch the video.  I want to spend the battery life actually watching the video.  I tried installing the Wifi Direct app onto the phone as well, but it wouldn't start on my phone.

I decided to take out the Micro SD card from my phone put it into my IOGear USB Micro SD Card Reader.  I transferred the videos to my laptop.  I plugged the USB cable from my tablet to my laptop expecting the Nexus 7 to show up as a USB mass storage device.  Ubuntu didn't recognize it.  I did a quick Google search on my phone and found this blog post about mounting a Nexus 7 in Debian-based Linux distributions.  This worked, but some weird things started happening.  I could not browse the Nexus 7 filesystem using Nautilus.  I decided to copy using the command line.  I tend to use rsync --progress instead of cp so that I get a progress bar.  The copy "worked" but the rename failed.  I decided to use the cp command and it looked like it worked.  I checked the folder, and no files were there.  I decided to change the Nexus 7 to use Camera mode instead of MTP mode and it worked instantly.  I had write access to the photos that were on the camera.  I know its a hack, but I copied some videos to the photos folder.

The Camera mode transfer worked and I was able to watch the videos at the airport and on the airplane.  Although awkward, this method did work and it seemed to have minimal drawbacks.  That is until I got home.  I started my tablet and my laptop later in the night.  Then I noticed something weird on my laptop.  I was using way more space on my Dropbox than I had earlier in the day!  I log into the site and a new video was there.  My laptop was downloading the new video.  I'm guessing the second video was still uploading while my laptop was downloading the first video.  Android's Dropbox sync is based on the Camera Upload feature...which is how the file got transferred.  This means deleting a file "photo" doesn't actually remove it from Dropbox.  Since the file still wasn't downloaded on my laptop, I couldn't delete it.  It took me a while to figure out how to delete the file on Dropbox's website (I'm not used to right-clicking in a website).  Now that I'm home and I don't have to worry about battery life, I can look into a better way to transfer files between the phone and tablet for my next adventure.