Want to Access Your Xoom from Your Mac? Download This!

"Android 3.0 Honeycomb, the OS that runs on the recently-released Motorola Xoom, will not bond with Mac OS X unless you install a helper program on your PC first . . . . MTP started off as a Windows Media Player technology, which is probably why Apple doesn't support it, but today it's represented by a standard USB device class and an extension of its precursor, PTP."

Due to changes in file transfer protocols in Honeycomb, if you own a Mac you won't be able to access files on your tablet without a third-party application. Windows users should have native support since this did start off as a Microsoft protocol. The bigger story, as far as I'm concerned, is that with this new protocol the files on your external storage will be available both to your device and to the computer that it is attached to. I've found that this limitation (files only being available to either the device or to the host computer) can be a bit of a pain since any apps I have installed to external storage are not available when I have mass storage turned on.

I, for one, am looking forward to seeing this available on all devices in the future. How about you? Have you used this application to hook your Xoom to your Mac? Is it working well for you? Are you, like me, looking forward to a wider implementation of MTP?