AirDroid is a free Android application that you can use to control your Android device from your desktop, by using a web browser (so it on Linux and any other OS). It can be used to transfer files (upload to the phone or download to your desktop), browse images, quickly send or read an SMS and many others.

The latest AirDroid 2 beta could only be downloaded by using an invitation, but the apk can now be downloaded by everyone, although it's not on Google Play just yet. The new version comes with many cool new features such as a new "Find my phone" service, a remote camera feature and others.

By default, when connecting an Android device to an Ubuntu computer, gvfs is used via gphoto2 (because gvfs doesn't have native MTP support yet). And that doesn't always work properly.

Here's my experience with this: trying to mount my Android 4.2.1 phone fails most of the time (I've experienced the same behaviour with Android 4.1 too), usually with some "Sorry, could not display all the contents of "Android": Timeout was reached" errors. It does work at times, but it's very slow and with such an unreliable behaviour, an alternative is always nice.

I didn't try mtpfs but it seems that's not reliable any more either, but what I did try is Go-mtpfs and it works great under Ubuntu 12.10: it's fast and it works every time. Well, unless I forget to unlock the phone when I mount it (it's probably something sleep-related because it doesn't always happen), but anyway.

Well, this is not new but I've somehow missed the news. Anyway, I was reading on the Launchpad blog that you can use Tomboy Notes on your Android device. The app is called "Tomdroid" and it supports note syncing between your desktop computer and Android device.