One more bites the dust

[Christopher Schmidt]

On Sun, Jan 08, 2006 at 10:54:40PM -0500, Fred wrote:
> Now, if someone can give me some helpful pointers about getting it to sink 
> with Konsole via BlueTooth, my joy will be complete.  I could get it working 
> eventually, but just don't have the time right now. I hate having to sync 
> with Windoze -- never works quite right.

For the record (and probably somewhat off topic for this list), this is
the primary reason I have a mac: Bluetooth integration. 

Using bluetooth, I want to perform several tasks:

 * Sync Contacts from computer to phone and back
 * Sync calendar events from computer to phone and back
 * Use Dial-up networking to use my phone as a modem over bluetooth
   (GPRS)
 * Less importantly then (but more so now), I'd like to be able to send
   files from the phone to the computer (camera images)
 * Least importantly, I'd like to be able to send files from the
   computer to the phone. (Python scripts, mostly.)

When I last tried these tasks (around January 2k4), none of them were
easy -- and when I say "not easy", I mean, I spent several weeks of free
time compiling various underdocumented bluetooth stacks in an attempt to
get any of them working.

I was eventually able to achieve the last two items on my list with a
lot of hard work, using command line tools and scripts that I wrote
myself.

With my Mac, I just open iSync, and it lets me add my phone, and sync up
the first two just by pressing a button. Dial up networking requires
stepping through some prompts to set it up, and knowing the *99# code to
use a dial out number. Sending files to the computer simply pops up a
dialog asking me to receive it, and sending files to the phone just uses
a simple GUI tool called "Bluetooth File Transfer".

If there's one thing Linux could do better for integration with mobile
devices, it would be a well documented, highly functional bluetooth
integration attempt. It may be that this has changed in the time since:
I was running a 2.4.20 kernel when doing this, and there was no clear
winner among the bluetooth stacks at the time, which I think there may
be now. But I can tell you that even getting the limited amount of
things done that I did was very difficult, and the 3rd option on my list
above was something I was simply never able to do, and wanted to quite
badly. 

So, I bought a Mac instead. And I've been happy with it ever since.

-- 
Christopher Schmidt
Web Developer
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