How to Download Your Photos from a Sprint Sanyo SCP-3200 Cell Phone

If you are tired of not being able to download and save your photos from your Sprint Sanyo SCP-3200 phone, read on. I spent several hours on one afternoon and got it to work. Here is how was able to access these files on this trick cell phone.

I'm kind of old-fashioned about cell phones. I never get caught up in the hype over the newest and craziest cell phones on the market today. While I am familiar with the upcoming and latest releases, I still prefer having an old school cell phone, one I'm not afraid to beat up on hiking trips, and a dirt cheap plan. I'm even using Sprint as a network provider, not exactly the best option as many people will tell you. Sprint makes it incredibly difficult to for users to download their photos and contact information to their PC off of their phones, unless users subscribe to Sprint's Data Services. I'm rocking an old SCP-3200, and paying extra for Data Services on that phone is pretty silly, in my opinion. However, I did want to back up my fairly hefty contact list and also download the low-res pictures I snapped on my phone camera. After jumping through a lot of hoops, I managed to do it. Do you have a SCP-3200, the older Sanyo cell phone model, with Sprint and want to get your data off of it? Read on!

I did loads of web research before attempting to get the info off of the phone. I'm fairly technically savvy, and didn't mind getting my hands dirty to save a little money and learn more how my phone worked. I browsed dozens of forums, ran loads of search terms, and finally hit a fairly good set of posts about how to get photos and other stuff off of the SCP-3200.

First, you will need to buy a suitable cable to get the info off of your phone. I purchased one off of eBay for $4, you can also find them on several cell phone websites. Don't pay too much for a cable, even for ones that "guarantee" to work. Go to eBay, and do a search for "scp-3200 cable" (minus the "" marks). There should be a pretty decent selection of cables offered, some with driver disks as well (not sure how accurate these driver disks are).

Next, I downloaded the recommended drivers for this phone. Sprint offers a connection manager tool that supposedly included the correct drivers for the phone, but many users reported not being able to get those drivers to function properly with BitPim (covered later). The drivers I got (use at your own risk) came from DriverGuide.com (direct link). This website makes you click past a lot of pages of junk to get the drivers, but in the end I was able to download them with no problems. Install the drivers for your operating system. Remember, backup your computer before doing this, I make no guarantees that it will work. I unzipped the drivers folder, opened the folder for my operating system, selected all the files, then right clicked 'em and selected "install." This took a few minutes, but eventually worked without any issues.

Then, using the cable, I connected my phone (phone was turned on) to the computer. The computer recognized my phone right away, thanks to my installing the drivers beforehand. I had tried earlier to simply let the auto-detect find the drivers after downloading them, but that did not work. Then, after the device was installed, I went to the computer's Device Manage (access it by clicking "Start", "Control Panel", "System", "Hardware", "Device Manager." Then, click "Ports (COM & LPT)" and notice which COM port your phone is located on (most people have it on COM13 on COM12, some have it on COM4) and found which COM port the phone was installed to.

Download and install BitPim, the latest version, from the BitPim website (google it). BitPim is a free program to connect to cell phones with. Run BitPim, and, at start up (the first time it's used),it will NOT auto detect the SCP-3200 (although make sure you have it plugged in). Click on the "Find Phone" option at the top, click "Yes" at the no-phone found popup, (click "Run settings"). Run the "Phone Wizard" option, and select Sprint, Sanyo, SCP-3200. Click "Next", then make sure to set the COM port to the COM port you have the phone set to (found under Device Manager, previously mentioned step). Click "Detect Phone", then it should find the phone and say "Passed." Hooray!

Click finish, set the COM port again to the correct port number, and click "Ok" to close the window. In the main window, click "Get Phone info" (Top left corner of window, may be labeled as "get phone data" or shown as a phone icon with an arrow pointing away from it). Click "replace all" on the popup for all options (if this is the first time downloading from the phone). Click "Ok" and BitPim will download all the selected info, if possible. You may get one further popup, which you just click "Ok" on. When the download is finally complete (check the status in the bottom left corner of the main window), you will be able to click the icons on the left side of the window to access downloaded info. For me, I went to the "Media" section and click on "camera", and BitPim showed me my photos I had taken on my cell, then downloaded to my computer. I selected the ones I wanted, and copied them (Click "edit", then "copy" at the top left of the window) to a folder on my desktop. Success! This procedure was not easy at all but I was happy to get it working and get my phone photos off of my Sanyo Sprint SCP-3200 cell phone.

Why get my photos off of such an old phone? The pictures aren't exactly Flickr quality, but I still wanted to save a few to my computer. Sometimes, you'll catch a moment in a picture that you just have to make a backup of, no matter how crummy or low resolution the photo is. Regardless, I hope this tutorial helps if you are seeking to get your phone data off of your SCP-3200.