Friday, January 10, 2003
Project "Canadian Bluetooth" Was a Success!
Posted by Jason Dunn in "THOUGHT" @ 10:04 AM
Yesterday I said I was giving Bluetooth another try, this time with a client of mine who wanted to be set up with a Bluetooth Phone and Pocket PC. After the initial snag of discovering that Toshiba simply wouldn't sell the Bluetooth version of the E740 in North America, we switched to a Dell Axim and a Socket CF Bluetooth card. So how did the process go?
All in all, quite painless. There were a few glitches though - I installed the driver off the CD onto the Pocket PC, disconnected the Pocket PC, soft reset it, put in the Socket card...and got a "Card Not Recognized" error. :? I then went to the Socket Web site, downloaded the newest driver (which was dated pre-Axim anyway), and tried to install it again. This time the install took, and I walked through the wizard. It was pretty easy to get it bonded to the phone, and once I called Rogers AT&T and got the "phone number", (*99#9 or something), I was nearly done. One glitch though that Microsoft should address - they're still using the default dialing preferences from the Windows desktop. How many of us really need to put 9 in front of all dialing strings to get an outside line? :lol: I'm sure there are quite a few of you that use a dial-up modem to get Internet access, but let's face it: wireless is the future. It took me a few clicks to find the dialing preferences screen (it's not easily accessible from the control panel), delete the 9, and try to connect. BAM!
I was really impressed with the speed of the hand off, and strangely enough, the GPRS connection seems to initialize even faster than on my XDA. Different carriers though, so Rogers may have a more optimized routine than the Fido network.
All in all, I'd say I had a pretty good Bluetooth experience. 99% of the reason why is Socket Communications - way to go guys! The step by step wizard was nothing short of amazing, and if it wasn't there it would have taken me much longer to get things up and running. This only reinforces my opinion that Bluetooth itself is never the problem - it's the implementation and drivers from the company selling the product that either makes it painful or wonderful. If only more companies were like Socket Communications!
All in all, quite painless. There were a few glitches though - I installed the driver off the CD onto the Pocket PC, disconnected the Pocket PC, soft reset it, put in the Socket card...and got a "Card Not Recognized" error. :? I then went to the Socket Web site, downloaded the newest driver (which was dated pre-Axim anyway), and tried to install it again. This time the install took, and I walked through the wizard. It was pretty easy to get it bonded to the phone, and once I called Rogers AT&T and got the "phone number", (*99#9 or something), I was nearly done. One glitch though that Microsoft should address - they're still using the default dialing preferences from the Windows desktop. How many of us really need to put 9 in front of all dialing strings to get an outside line? :lol: I'm sure there are quite a few of you that use a dial-up modem to get Internet access, but let's face it: wireless is the future. It took me a few clicks to find the dialing preferences screen (it's not easily accessible from the control panel), delete the 9, and try to connect. BAM!
I was really impressed with the speed of the hand off, and strangely enough, the GPRS connection seems to initialize even faster than on my XDA. Different carriers though, so Rogers may have a more optimized routine than the Fido network.
All in all, I'd say I had a pretty good Bluetooth experience. 99% of the reason why is Socket Communications - way to go guys! The step by step wizard was nothing short of amazing, and if it wasn't there it would have taken me much longer to get things up and running. This only reinforces my opinion that Bluetooth itself is never the problem - it's the implementation and drivers from the company selling the product that either makes it painful or wonderful. If only more companies were like Socket Communications!
