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I hear a lot of jokes about my name. None of them are funny.
My fiancee Gina plans events for World Travel Meetings and Incentives. We live in a loft in San Francisco, and can occasionally be found flying kites at various spots around the city. If you're on Xbox Live, look me up. My gamertag is Willski.
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May 6, 2003
Bluetooth
So, it’s been almost four years since I saw my first demonstration of Bluetooth technology at Comdex. The demo was simple. A man wearing a wireless Bluetooth headset used his Palm III to tell the cell phone in his pocket to call one of the people in the audience, without ever touching his phone. This struck me as extremely cool.
I’ve waited for the technology to develop for a long time. Last year, I saw Palm demonstrate the same thing again with their new Tungsten T. Last week I swiped a Nokia 3650 from work to take home and play with. After digging around in the lab, I found a TDK Bluetooth USB adapter for my PC too and decided it was time to configure my phone to sync with Outlook automagically.
About three hours later, I finally figured out how to get it to work. Instead of connecting natively using the Bluetooth protocol, you have to set up a virtual serial port on your PC, then connect to the phone via that. There are no less than five different areas that you configure the serial port, but it turns out that only two of them actually matter.
Next up was the headset. I followed the instructions that Jabra provided, and setup a link between the Bluetooth headset and the phone, but pressing the button on the headset does absolutely nothing. I don’t get the signal from the phone or anything. Pretty weak. It turns out that the Nokia phone looks for a “Handsfree” profile to do wireless phoning, while the Jabra headset uses a “Headset” profile. And Bluetooth is supposed to be plug and play…
Aside from the hitch with the headset, the Bluetooth stuff is pretty cool. It’s not a huge hit on the battery life, it works reasonably well now that it’s configured, and my phone always has up-to-date info from my contacts list and my calendar.
///Will | Computing | Email this entry