Starting with Honeycomb the storage partition is exposed through MTP (or PTP), this way it can be accessed concurrently by both Android and your computer. Before Honeycomb, said partition could be accessed as an USB mass-storage drive but that required it to be unmounted, thus making all data unavailable to Android while it was connected to a computer.

In my experience only Windows 7 has passable MTP support. On Linux I had mixed results with gvfs and mtpfs (slow and crashy). jmtpfs [1] is a nice replacement, though. Google also released an application for OS X [2] but I can't try it since I don't own an Apple computer.

My solution to the problem was to install a WebDAV server (such as [3]) on my device (Galaxy Nexus) and access it wirelessly.

  [1]: http://research.jacquette.com/jmtpfs-exchanging-files-between-android-devices-and-linux/
  [2]: http://www.android.com/filetransfer/
  [3]: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.theolivetree.webdavserver

This is not an issue with Apple or Samsung, it's an Android decision.

Support for the USB Mass Storage protocol has been deprecated in Android in favor of MTP (Media Transfer Protocol) starting with Ice Cream Sandwich.

The experience in Windows and on Linux is just as poor with this phone. (I love the phone, though.)

Why can't Apple support MTP? Linux gets cited for lack of hardware or protocol support (MTP to an Android device works fine in Linux, btw), but it's not Apple's fault when they can't or don't provide drivers for common, standardized consumer electronics?

It seems fairly obvious that the reason is that facts which do not fit the narrative are not talked about. Confirmation bias in action.

MTP does not work fine in Linux (specifically, Ubuntu 12.04). You can read the files but not write arbitrary files into arbitrary folders.

I haven't had any trouble using a Nexus 7 with Windows, it's worked like a charm. What's supposed to be the huge problem with MTP, exactly?

I take that back, my Galaxy S III does work as expected using MTP with Windows 7. Previously my workplace was using an older Windows.

Oh my

This is 100% to blame on Samsung, sorry.

Even though my Samsung phone is seen as a USB device (and it works on MAC OS X), but maybe in the newer models they removed this functionality (and called it a feature)

People may complain that iPhones need iTunes but then again it's iTunes not the gigantic pile of crap that is Kies

No it has nothing to do with Samsung. In ICE Google changed how the partitions are handled: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showpost.php?p=11714077&...

It was pure engineering tradeoff to improve things in the long term. If anything OEMs would have preferred the old 'just works', sub-optimal, gives-an-excuse-to-obsolete-a-phone, lower support issues, solution. The ball is now in operating systems' court to support this standard in a way it wasn't envisioned to work a few years ago.

Even ubuntu has been slow on this front.

Nice explanation, if it's to facilitate upgrades I'm all for it!

That's the thing about samsung. They copied the bad stuff as well: weird connectors, itunes / kies.

This is samsung not following USB standards.

OS X has perfectly find support for media devices, and has worked fine with every digital camera, SD Card or other card reader, etc, that I've attached via USB in the past decade!

Actually it's lack of MTP support in OS X.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_Transfer_Protocol

Wrong. It's Google's decision to abandon direct mounting Android drives in ICS in favor of the MTP standard.

Which is the right move in the long term, although it's certainly causing some pain in the short term.

Everything under the sun supports UMS, that OSX does is nothing special. That is not what his device was using though.