Connect "smart" phone to Ubuntu 12.10

Last week I upgraded from Ubuntu 12.04 (LTS -- maybe I made a mistake) to 12.10. Today I tried to connect my "smart" phone (Android) for data exchange; that seemed to work after five or ten minutes -- how does MS manage to do it in a couple of seconds? But that's not the problem.

My problem is that I cannot copy to the external volume. Mount says "/dev/sdb on /media/floppy0 type vfat (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev)" but when I do an "ls -la" on an external directory I want to copy to it says "drwxr-xr-x 2 root root ...". That explains nearly everything; I am not "root" (though I can choose to be, as it's my local system). But what has changed in 12.10? If I cannot mount my phone as writable, why? If I can, how?

I realize that it might not be easy to identify the person inserting a USB cable to be the same person that is typing at the X server. So if the powers who be consider a higher level of security necessary, why don't they tell me? I spent 4+ hours downloading Ubuntu 12.10, and during that I was just told that my hardware might be insufficient for the new shell. (It's true, logging in now takes nearly a minute, compared to a couple of seconds in 12.04, but that's all.)

Any help appreciated.
Aisano