I
have invested hours upon hours of getting Bluetooth to work properly.
It is my hope to help people get their various bluetoothing needs
solved using this page all at once, given each step is a "final"
stage in itself depending on what you want to do with it. Here's
the whole sordid story.
Back in October 2001, I got very excited about the
upcoming iPAQ 3870 model. This was the latest model from Compaq
that not only had a redesigned case and plenty of improved features
but also the addition of Bluetooth. Given I also had plans to buy
a Bluetooth phone and other such accessories I was sold on the possibilities
of a wirelessly networked device without the added bulk of an expansion
pack.
However, things turned sour when I realised (after puchase of course)
that even a Bluetooth adapter for my PC would cost upwards of $500.
Undeterred I set up my new T68 to use my Bluetooth for dial up networking
using GSM data transmission. This however was painfully slow, and
to top it off when I went for my first trip away with real need
to use mobile Internet, the iPAQ's Internet abilities crapped themselves
and soft-resets wouldn't fix it, only a hard-reset. Goodbye all
my settings.
Step 1: Getting a good Bluetooth adapter
Thankfully around March 2002 I got wind of a Bluetooth adapter
prices quite competitively that was manufactured by a company called
Tecom. They were selling
these for USD$50, which added to shipping of $15, was a lot cheaper
than Australian products. I believe you can now pick them up for
as low as $35-$40, which is amazing for the quality of the product.
Check out Price Watch to
get the latest prices for it.
So now I had my Bluetooth adapter. So what could I do with it?
Well, supposedly I could synchronize my phone and my iPAQ with Outlook
over it as well as edit phone settings and downloading SMSes. Furthermore
I should've had the ability to send files to the phone. Do you think
I could get anything to work?
Tecom BT3030 Bluetooth Adapter
Step 2: Getting the right software (the
source of most problems)
That's right, I had a useless Bluetooth adapter for about four
weeks. After numerous attempts at getting it to work properly, I
wrote to the company in desperation as their website did not have
any updated drivers. I was given the address to their new website
(shame there are no links to it on their old one) which had updated
drivers. Success!! If you have the Tecom product, the latest drivers
are here
or if you have 3Com try here.
Before you install the latest software, make sure all the previous
stuff is uninstalled. When you finish uninstalling any old stuff,
make sure you do the reboot before installing the new software.
Once you've done that, run the setup program, and allow your computer
to reboot again. If you don't, bad things happen. Trust me. If you're
doing it from a clean install you shouldn't have any real issues.
You can have your adapter plugged in before or after you start installing
the software, and just make sure you click "yes" to anything
about installing Bluetooth devices. Windows XP gets snooty about
them being uncertified but just ignore that.
At this stage you should have a Bluetooth Places icon on your desktop
(very important) and a little blue B in your taskbar. The B in taskbar
is great for connecting devices while the Bluetooth Places is used
to pair devices and set up these connections. Here are some screenshots
on how to get your iPAQ to now pair with your PC:
....
At this pointclick on "create bond with this device."
On your PC click on the little blue B and the following window should
pop up
Enter the passkey set on your iPAQ (I think it's 0000 if you haven't
set it - it's under Bluetooth settings). You should then get something
similar to the following screen:
Bonus step: Getting Ericsson software working
Just as an aside for other Ericsson owners with Bluetooth, this
is the point where you'd install the Ericsson
stuff. After installing it, pair the devices, and then go to
your "My Bluetooth Places" and click "Add Bluetooth
Place". Then select "Bluetooth Serial Port" as the
service, and select your Ericsson as the device that provides the
service. Click next. Whatever COM port this Bluetooth serial port
now uses, you should go into Phone Monitor Options and click on
the COM Ports tab. Select the COM port listed before and select
reserve and enable. Click ok. Next go back to your Bluetooth places.
Here is where stuff can go wrong. The most likely thing not to go
right is your phone to be recognised. To fix this, turn your phone
off then back on. Make sure Bluetooth is on. Right click on <whatever
you called your phone> Serial Port 1, and click connect. Wait
up to a minute or two, and voila. It should be connected. To check,
go back to phone monitor options, and under setup select "only
display the icon when the phone is connected". This will make
sure you know when the phone monitor software has actually found
your phone. You can now use the Ericsson software and/or the Outlook
stuff no worries.
So now I could synchronize stuff. Woopee do, I could do that already
over infrared. How about some cool stuff? I mean, Bluetooth is meant
to be a 1mbps connection right? I should be able to watch videos
and listen to music over it right? Wrong.
Step 3: Getting decent network access on
your iPAQ
Okay this is a really big problem. I mean, huge. I struggled with
this for ages and ages. If it wasn't the software it was some stupid
setup issue which you never would've thought of. I'll go through
the exact steps I did. Otherwise, when you try and connect network
access to your iPAQ, it is likely to display "authenticating"
forever and not actually connect.
Make sure you have the iPAQ and your PC paired. If you want to
get Activesync working over Bluetooth, then create a serial port
(see the bonus step on how to do it, exactly the same but with the
iPAQ and use a different COM port if you have a T68). Activesync
will work in parallel to any network connections... to initiate
it, make sure under "Connecting Settings" on your PC,
you have the COM port you specified for the serial connect enabled,
and then on the iPAQ click your Bluetooth icon and select "Start
Activesync". Not too hard so far. For the network connection
(which will allow wireless Internet and network file sharing) do
the following:
1. Open your Bluetooth LAN connection under Network Connections.
Click properties, and then click advanced. Select "allow other
network users to connect through this computer's Internet connection".
Just click okay and see how it goes. Don't worry if there's a problem.
2. Open your Internet connection under Network Connections. Do
exactly the same as above. No joke, you MUST do this to get network
access working. Sometimes on TDK/3Com cards it'll work out of the
box but definitely with Tecom cards you need to do this.
3. Go to your iPAQ, and go to the Bluetooth manager. Click on your
main PC. Click on Actions and select "Connect to Network Access".
It will then display "Connecting..." then "User Authenticated".
The screen will then disappear. Now you have a network connection
to your PC. Your next problem though is how pathetic the network
drive mapping is handled with Pocket PCs, ie, it's not.
Connect to Network Access option
Step 4: Getting your network drives mapped
To get decent network mapping you need the excellent and free program
PE Pocket Explorer 2002. It essentially maps network places to what
the iPAQ sees as local folders. Go download it here
and install it. It's pretty easy to set up, just create a share
for the folder where you want to store your songs, and it'll map
it locally as My Pocket PC\NETWORK\<wherever>. Dead simple
to use.
...
Step 5: Getting songs to a size where they
can be streamed while still good quality
To get the music to play over the iPAQ, it's necessary to get the
bit rate to less than 64kbps. Bluetooth is meant to have a 1mbps
speed, however Compaq in their infinite wisdom decided to cripple
their Bluetooth. As far as I can tell it's 64kbps upstream and 64kbps
downstream. Pretty pathetic yes, and for video you'd definitely
want a WiFi connection. However, I'd rather not have the battery
drain and bulkiness associated with that. To get our songs to a
decent level that still sounds good, Ogg Vorbis fits our needs perfectly.
A 64kbps Ogg Vorbis file, to me, does not sound any different to
a 128kbps MP3. I was very impressed. Also iit will run over the
Bluetooth stream which of course is definitely a plus. Sometimes
however, you may get skipping with your connection. I have no idea
why, but it comes and goes. I had a week of no problems at all and
then all of a sudden I couldn't get it to play a single song without
skipping. Other days it still works perfectly. If you have this
problem, downsample a bit more to 48kbps and it'll definitely work.
To convert to Ogg Vorbis, the best program I found was dbpoweramp.
You then need to download the Ogg Vorbis codec from here.
After installing, to convert, simply right click a file (or files)
and select "convert to". One of the easiest programs I've
ever used.
Step 6: Playing the songs on your iPAQ
So we now have our songs in a format where we can stream them,
and we have the connections all ready to go. Next we need a program
that can decode Ogg Vorbis and run at a decent speed on the iPAQ.
Our contender is Pocket Divx. Download that baby from here.
Also try the excellent Pocket
MVP which can also play OGM video files (basically the ogg version
of DivX). Install it to your iPAQ... there aren't really any options
you really need to set up, just make sure caching isn't turned on
or else that takes longer than it does to play half the song. So
the steps to take now to get songs playing in it are:
1. Connect your Bluetooth network access
2. Open Pocket Divx and find the directory with your files under
NETWORK
3. Click the All button up the top to get the whole folder to play
...
And voila. You're done. I hook up my iPAQ to my stereo, turn the
screen off and can leave it there for hours without a recharge.
It's damn handy.
Nothing is really labor unless you would rather be doing something else.
I
have invested hours upon hours of getting Bluetooth to work properly.
It is my hope to help people get their various bluetoothing needs
solved using this page all at once, given each step is a "final"
stage in itself depending on what you want to do with it. Here's
the whole sordid story.
..
..
...
...
