Bluetooth ActiveSync Blues

[ChristopherTD]

I borrowed a 3Com Bluetooth adaptor (USB) for my ThinkPad, thinking that it would be neat to be able to use BT for sync. WiFi works pretty well for sync, but chews up the battery, so a low power alternative would be good.

Foolish me.

After 2 hours of trying every possible permutation to get the wretched thing to work my efforts culminated in a spontaneous hard-reset of my 5450. Fortunately a recent backup meant it was merely inconvenient.

I could get the iPaq partnered to the Thinkpad, and send files back and forth, I just couldn't get ActiveSync to work. Both the PC and the PPC seemed to want to initiate the intial connection. I couldn't get one into a listening state so that it could accept an inbound connection.

Is there a magic sequence of actions that can make this work, or is it better to simply stick to WiFi and ignore BT for ActiveSync?

(BT works brilliantly to my T68i phone, especially for SMS with EasySMS, I never imagined it would be so awkward to use with a PC)

[KiLLiN-TiMe]

You need to find out what com port your bluetooth adapter is using for its serial port. go into your hardware manager under control panel and system. once you have this information....

Open activesync and click file then connection settings. Tell activesync to use the following com port (the one for bluetooth serial) and then apply those settings. You may even want to uncheck usb and the allow network boxes until you get the bluetooth working then go back and enable those two once you have things up and running.

on your ppc open up your bluetooth manager and click on a new connection. scroll down and choose Activesync via bluetooth. follow the on screen instructions and they will tell you to do the same thing i just did.

Good luck... Hope this helps.

[ChristopherTD]

Thanks for the tips. I did try all those steps, but when I told AS on the laptop to use COM4 (which was the BT serial port) it tried to connect on that port, and then marked it as unavailable when it couldn't make a connection. The BT software showed a serial connection being established so maybe it was fussing about authentication or something like that.

I went around in the loop several times until the hard reset made me call it a day!

[Leo the 3rd]

Christopher, I feel your pain, I'm running Windows XP Pro and my ActiveSync 3.7 only registers COM1 as the available port while my BT Serial Port can be set from COM10-20. I can not get the ports to match up. I'm using 1.4.6 drivers for a D-Link DBT-120. Any help would be appreciated.

[caywen]

Soapbox:

As much as I want BT to be the PAN technology, IT SUCKS.

I had these exact same problems. Zero configuration my ass.

I don't see why authentication has to be such an in-your-face issue, and I don't see why a device can "connect" yet still be unable to use a service. These should be atomic. You should either be discovering or connected. There should be no in-between that leaves us feeling confused and cheated.

Or perhaps the problem isn't BT but AS instead. The other day, my friend and I connected his Sony/Ericsson phone to my iPaq 1945 flawlessly. We transferred files and it was painless. He took photos on his phone and I copied them to the iPaq to view the picture. So in my experience, device-to-device seems to work well (though configuration is still not zero-config).

Here is how I would improve the user experience for BT:

1. A device should always be discovering when it is on. Any device within 6' (with LOS) should be discovered within 5 seconds. I shouldn't have to go through a wizard to discover the cell phone in my pocket. The devices should just know each other exist without my interference.

2. Always encrypt communications. This should not be configurable, and the user shouldn't have to see the words "encrypted" "authentication" etc. The user should just know it's already secure and not have to toggle combinations of checkboxes to get things to work.

3. Get rid of per-service PIN codes. No one cares. One PIN code per device makes things simpler.

4. Either use hardware switch or one-tap BT toggle. Having to go through menus is killing the UE.

5. Automatic profile negotiation. If device A exposes a profile that device B knows how to use, the device should ask the user if he wants to do that activity. The query should have a "don't show me this again" feature for power users.

I hate the fact that two people have to punch a whole lot of buttons and fiddle with settings to exchange some simple data. It shows how much the BT teams have really thought about how Joe Sixpack will use the technology.

[KiLLiN-TiMe]

my ActiveSync 3.7 only registers COM1 as the available port while my BT Serial Port can be set from COM10-20.
open active sync and click "File", "connection settings".
Uncheck everything and apply those settings. Then reopen it and click the com port option. you should be able to change it to something besides com 1 now.