My headset got here today, Amazon don’t mess around!

On first appearances – totally cool 🙂 It is a big big/bulky when you put it on (sticks out from your ear a bit, and waggles when you flick your head around), but it sits nicely, and feels quite comfortable, so it’s ok, and like I mentioned, I don’t need it to be ultra-sleek anyway. The case that it comes with is really cool – doubling as a charging cradle and travel protection case. I plugged it in and got it charging while having a quick look at the manual. Nothing too interesting, basically one button handles everything, it’s just a matter of how long you hold it down.

Pairing the headset with my phone (Nokia 6230) was extremely easy – just put the headset in discoverable mode (turn off, then hold down the magic button until the light flashes blue + red), then tell my phone to search for available enhancements (via the Bluetooth menu). A pairing code is required, but that’s just ‘0000’, as the manual states. Enter that and you’re off.

Then I started noticing some problems… browsing around with the headset connected, I’d get the volume indicator come up randomly, repeatedly. Turns out that the headset was disconnecting and reconnecting every couple of seconds.

I thought I’d give it a go with my iPAQ (H5500). Very similar process, equally simple. Headset into discoverable, then on the iPAQ you go to the Bluetooth Manager, make a new connection, select ‘Headset’ as the type. You need to search for it, then enter the pairing code (0000) and you’re connected. I chose not to bother with a secure/encrypted connection, since it’s just audio.

2 seconds later, I hear the tone on the headset that says it’s disconnecting, then another 2 seconds and it connects again. Same problem as with my phone – repeated disconnect/reconnect.

Since I was still at work at this stage, I decided I’d leave it until I got home to have a proper look at things.

When I got home, I had the chance to also try connecting to my PC. Now of the 3 different connections I have available, I at least expected my PC to work. I’m connecting a LOGITECH headset, to my computer, via the LOGITECH Bluetooth Hub. Guess what – same problem. I can pair it perfectly, and it thinks it’s connected, but then it just disconnects and reconnects again and again.

I’ve emailed Logitech tech support, but from my experience, they’re not very good. Amazon are going to have a return on their hands in the near future I think. Fingers crossed that the Logitech people just send me a new one or something, because I definitely think it’s something wrong with the headset. 3 attempted connections; 3 of the same faulty connection problems; sounds like a firmware problem to me!

In my efforts to find a bluetooth headset (which I really wasn’t expecting to be such and arduous task), I also tried (I think it was this model) a Motorola HS850. I didn’t think I was asking that much of the headset – it just needed to be compatible with these uses:

1. Pair with my Nokia 6230 (for normal handsfree cell-phone operation)
2. Pair with my Logitech diNovo hub on my Windows XP desktop (for use with Skype)
3. Pair with the built-in bluetooth on my 12″ iBook (again, mainly for Skype)
4. Pair with my HP iPAQ H5550 (for listening to music, and potentially for Skype as well)

Turns out that this is a tough ask, and the HS850 failed on the last three of those requirements! It paired up with the 6230 without a problem, but all of the others proved to be too much for it. Admittedly I didn’t give it too much work, because I thought it felt like a flimsy little piece of junk, but still – it didn’t work straight away 🙂

I took it back to the T-Mobile store the next day and exchanged it for the Jabra FreeSpeak 250

The WirelessDevNet is a pretty cool website, and has channels on a bunch of interesting topics, in particular Bluetooth and Location Based Services.

They offer an RSS Feed, but it appears to be for the entire site, and isn’t available per channel. Pity, but still good.

Obviously, it is targetted more towards developers, so if you’re into that sort of thing, then this site might be for you. It contains a lot of articles written locally, as well as pulling in and referencing articles and tutorials from other locations, so it’s a decent ‘landing pad’ for wireless development.

As I mentioned in a previous post, I got a new phone before I left Australia, the Nokia 6230. I got it because it had Bluetooth, took video and photos, and was tri-band (so it would work in Australia and the US). Unfortunately, because I am on a pre-paid T-Mobile, I don’t have access to data or multimedia messaging, so it limits the cool things that I can do with my phone, but it still rocks, and is way ahead of most of the handsets available here, which was a bit of a surprise.

Some of the cool things that I like being able to do with my phone;

1. Take a photo and then Bluetooth it to my iPAQ for editing, saving etc
2. Dial a number on my phone, directly from my iPAQ
3. Synch the Contacts (phone numbers etc) from Outlook on my PC, across to my phone – I always have every number I know about on hand now
4. Use the loudspeaker/speakerphone – it’s surprisingly useful
5. Take photos to use for my wallpaper!
6. Play mp3s – can’t help it on that one, had to add it 🙂

So basically, I think it was a great purchase. Being stuck on T-Mobile (because they are the only ones I can find here that will allow me to bring my own handset, and use their SIM), and paying a fair bit for my calls sucks, but it’s bearable to keep using the phone, ’cause it’s so much better than the other stuff around here (and I paid for it outright man, I’m not going to retire it already!).

If you’re looking for a nice-sized, sturdy, full-featured phone for use in Asia, Australia or America, then the Nokia 6230 is your man 🙂

Oh it’s sweet – Contacts -> Send via Bluetooth -> scan for devices.

Haven’t had that much luck so far, only had one successful send, and I didn’t get to see who received that one either. Oh well, it’s all fun and games.

(Did I mention that I’m posting this on my iPAQ, using vi, from an SSH terminal, through PocketPuTTY, sitting in my bed, wirelessly connecting to my local network and thus to my server? Didn’t think so.)

I figured it’d be a good idea to update the firmware and ROM on my iPAQ, so I checked out the HP downloads site, and sure enough, there were updates available. I downloaded the following updates;

• HP iPAQ Pocket PC h5500 Series Firmware Update
• HP iPAQ Pocket PC h5500 Series ROM Update

intending to update the BIOS and all on-board stuff to get me up to date. I didn’t bother with the Bluetooth manager update, or the WLAN update, because it appears that those things are included in the BIOS updates. So anyway, I install both the firmware and the ROM updates, which results in clearing everything off my iPAQ and having to reinstall everything from scratch.

No problem I figured, I’ve done this on my Palm before, and everything (applications etc) just got transferred back the next time I synched… apparently not.

So I synch again, and it wants me to create a new profile on my desktop, because I haven’t named my device back to the same name as I had it before (“jane”, named after the computer-based lifeform in Ender’s Game!). That’s no good – I want it to synch back the same stuff, same data, same details etc. After playing around a little, I decide that I’ll go whole hog, so I close down ActiveSynch, get into the registry and start hacking around to move all the new settings which I’ve just created as ‘jane2’ and change them over to point to the other directories etc (‘jane’). Then I change my device’s name back to jane again, and see what happens.

At this point, everything appears to be fine – it actually works, and it’s synched all the old data back, and looks like it’s accepted me as an imposter jane… sort of, or something. Wonder if this is an exploitable way of stealing someone’s data? All I really did was created a new profile, then hacked the registry and pointed it to all the same directories as the old profile…

On top of that problem though, now I have a bigger one – WiFiFoFum doesn’t appear to work!

I don’t know if it’s anything to do with the hackery that’s gone on, I can’t see why it would be, because that was more to do with synching and my desktop machine, I didn’t do anything dodgy on my handheld. I can only assume that this means that there’s some sort of problem with the new ROMs and the way that WFFF is coded. According to the program, when it tries to start up, there’s this problem;

WiFiFoFum.exe
MissingMethodException

WirelessManager::Init+0xc
Form1::.ctor+0xa2
Form1::Main+0xa

Hopefully the guy who writes WFFF can figure out what’s going on there and can fix it, because in the meantime I have no warstrolling toys again :(. Once I get my GPS unit, then I’ll really wanna be able to get out there again, so until then it’s not too bad, but then there’s no GPS support in WFFF yet either, so that’s not really an issue is it?…