Tuesday, June 11, 2002
Bluetooth, again.... Sigh.....
Posted by Ed Hansberry in "THOUGHT" @ 04:41 PM
I had a great trip to Ft. Lauderdale for the DDH Software HandBase Summit. I'll have a write-up in the next day or so, but suffice it to say, HanDBase 3.0 seems to have all of the bases covered, from a single doctor to enterprise data synchronization.
One of the new features is the ability to do peer to peer synchronization of a database via bluetooth. HanDBase 3.0 is still in beta and the Palm bits are about 30 days ahead of the Pocket PC bits, so they demoed the bluetooth synchronization using a DDH software M515 with a Palm (Toshiba) SD BT card and an audience member that had an identical setup. Well, they tried. And tried. The twin M515's wouldn't bond. I swear I could have installed Palm Desktop on two randomly selected laptops, enabled IR in the BIOS, watched Windows ME pitch a hissy about some IRQ conflict (I am amazed at the number of those with relatively new hardware that haven't upgraded to XP), flicked some stuff in the device manager, rebooted, synced the Palms to their respective PC's and then swapped floppies. And I STILL would have had time to get a refill on my coffee!
It certainly wasn't DDH Software's fault. Probably wasn't Palm's either. Bluetooth just doesn't work as advertised. I see more driver patches and updates to make BT devices compatible, yet that is what the BT standard is supposed to do.
Î know, I know, some of you love it. You have your iPAQ and Ericcson working great together. Well, there were some people that didn't have a problem with Service Pack 2 for Windows NT 4.0.
One of the new features is the ability to do peer to peer synchronization of a database via bluetooth. HanDBase 3.0 is still in beta and the Palm bits are about 30 days ahead of the Pocket PC bits, so they demoed the bluetooth synchronization using a DDH software M515 with a Palm (Toshiba) SD BT card and an audience member that had an identical setup. Well, they tried. And tried. The twin M515's wouldn't bond. I swear I could have installed Palm Desktop on two randomly selected laptops, enabled IR in the BIOS, watched Windows ME pitch a hissy about some IRQ conflict (I am amazed at the number of those with relatively new hardware that haven't upgraded to XP), flicked some stuff in the device manager, rebooted, synced the Palms to their respective PC's and then swapped floppies. And I STILL would have had time to get a refill on my coffee!
It certainly wasn't DDH Software's fault. Probably wasn't Palm's either. Bluetooth just doesn't work as advertised. I see more driver patches and updates to make BT devices compatible, yet that is what the BT standard is supposed to do.Î know, I know, some of you love it. You have your iPAQ and Ericcson working great together. Well, there were some people that didn't have a problem with Service Pack 2 for Windows NT 4.0.
