Getting Around To Bluetooth.

Maybe my whole concept of Bluetooth is off.  When I first heard of it I thought it was just another wireless scheme dreamed up by wireless keyboard manufacturers that would be just as useless as all the other proprietary wireless devices I own.  But then I learned a little more about it and I thought it might be useful.  Personal networks, adhoc mobile networks, anywhere you want local wireless communication.

So recently I read this article about a bluetooth stereo that's sposed to pair up with a wide array of phones and other BT devices.  And I thought, "So?  Isn't that what BT is sposed to be about?"  High compatibility based on compliance with standard profiles?  Devices are sposed to handshake and say "hi, I'm a headphone" "hi, headphone, I'm a phone.  I know what to do with you."  But that's about as far as I've actually seen the technology go, making business people indistinguishable from raving lunatics on the metro.  And that might be because the first BT device I owned was a crippled Verizon phone.

I was halfway through writing this post when I realized that I just assumed that my phone was useless as a bluetooth device.  But I'd never tried it.  So I dive into my Pocket PC, enable the Bluetooth and open the BT manager.  Switch to my V710 handset and cruise over to the Bluetooth settings.  (The only reason I could find it is cause I'm terribly smart and remember how I turned it off when I first got it.)  Alright, test time, I click "Find Me" to enable discoverable mode for 60 seconds.  Hit "new" in the PPC manager and select "explore a Bluetooth device" cause I don't really know what to expect from my phone.  I pair the two and the PPC comes back with: 

"This device does not have any usable services, please activate any desired services and try again."

Sweet.  I figured maybe this was the end of it, cause I was prepared for the worst.  But I tried again.  You'd think I was a fool taking the same actions and expecting different results, but this time it came back with a dial-up networking profile.  Interesting.  I enter my skype number and a fake username and password.  Then the most surprising thing I could have imagined, actually happened.  The phone dialed.  It was as exhilarating as watching the moon landing.

I poked around a little more and tried the option to create a BT link for internet access (not dial-up) but my phone wasn't on the list of supported devices (surprise, surprise) and it started up the dial-up connection.  Probably because that's the only profile left after Verizon stripped out all the useful guts of actual Bluetooth.  So I can't use the piss poor low bandwidth connection I pay Verizon for, but I may be able to access a dial-up ISP through it.  Anyone know a free dial-up that I can mess around with?

And as I thought, I couldn't browse the files of a remote device because there's no profile for that, sneaky verizon, trying to make me download content from them.  But wait a second, my PPC has an sd slot and my transflash card (some of you may remember that its now called micro sd ) came with an sd adapter, so I don't even need bluetooth to liberate all those grainy, embarassing cell phone pictures. 

P.S.  I also discovered that my stylus kicks ass at cleaning my phone's lens.