mtp + htc phone only partially functional

Trying to use an HTC One-X phone with my Ubuntu 13.04 system and having some issues.
My question: am I doing something wrong or is this a bug? .....

Plug phone in via usb, I get either:
"Unable to mount android phone. Couldn't find matching udev device."
or
"Unable to mount android phone. Unable to open MTP device '[usb:003,005]'"
But then get a 'Files' window showing an icon for 'Internal Storage'.

'df' shows:
none                              4         0         4   0% /sys/fs/cgroup

ls -al /sys/fs/cgroup
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 40 May 23 09:26 .
drwxr-xr-x 6 root root  0 May 23 09:26 ..

In 'Files' I can:
- navigate the drive,
- create folders.
- copy files and folders to other places on my PC.
- delete files.

I can not:
- create files (get 'operation not supported by backend')
- open files (have to copy pictures to my pc to view them).

The biggest issue is not being able to open files directly (have to copy them first).

I guess that this procedure ( http://bernaerts.dyndns.org/linux/268-ubuntu-automount-any-mtp-device) would solve my problem, but I would rather not do this if there is another more simple solution. Non technical people just wouldn't do this. I would expect to be able to plug in a phone and access its files as per normal, without this messing about.

A bug or am I doing something dumb?
Thanks for any advice.