Here is my first post under Consumer Evangelism.

This post comes courtesy of my nephew Andrew.  Andrew has a HP laptop which I just upgraded to Windows Vista Ultimate and he just purchased a new Motorola Q Smartphone from Sprint.  So he decided that because the phone has Windows Media Player on it, and he has a small collection of albums in Windows Media Player 11 under Vista, he would get a 2 Gig Mini-SD Card and have music on his phone.

This is an ok idea, though I am not a big fan of using your phone as an MP3 player, since it tends to use your battery up and not leave you with enough talk time.  In any case, he did it.  So he installs the Mini-SD card and hooks up the phone and tries to sync his music to the phone.  Unfortunately, he can only see the content of his phone and not the storage device in Windows Media Player 11.   This isn’t cool.  I check my phone (Treo 700w) on my laptop and I can sync with the storage card no problem.

So after much research I find this article: FIX: Only the external storage is available when you synchronize content from Windows Media Player 11 to a Windows Mobile 5-based device with AKU 2.3 or a later AKU (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/931621/en-us?spid=11372). Which is the exact opposite problem to the one I am seeing, but hey, my experience tells me close enough.  So I download it, install it and it WORKED!

So if you are trying to sync music from Windows Vista using Windows Media Player 11 to your Motorola Q’s storage device and you can see the storage device in WMP 11.  Download and install the above fix.  It appears to work like a charm.