Review: Apple Bluetooth adapter

Apr 27, '02 10:29:12AM

Contributed by: robg

macosxhints reader Jacco Rens sent in a review of Apple's new Bluetooth adapters which I thought you might find interesting.

Read the rest of the article for Jacco's review...

Jacco writes:

I ordered my Bluetooth adapter from the US Apple store, since they are still not available here in Holland. With the excellent help of Rob from macosxhints.com, I got them to Holland; others have to wait six to eight weeks :)

It's unbelievable how small these Bluetooth adapters are; they should have made a hole in it so we could put a rope through it to prevent losing it! As soon as I got them in, we did a computer to computer transfer to see how fast it was. With the computers only one meter apart, we managed to see a transfer rate of 30k/sec (like DSL).

Next thing was my phone, an Ericsson T39. Dumping a vCard or vCalendar file from my phone to the PowerBook was a snap, the files just pop up on the desktop. These files can be opened by Palm Desktop and more PIM applications; vCard is like an visit card and the vCalendar file is a Calendar item. Funny thing is that these are standards made in 1996 by Versit, which was a collaboration between IBM, AT&T, Siemens and Apple! So sending files to my computer was no problem; now I have a nice local backup of my data.

Next thing to try was of course, restoring this local backup back to the phone! No way, the phone doesn't seem to to keep hold of the data flow, resulting in double or missing entries in my phonebook. Item per item was no problem, and doing this by IrDa works well too. Maybe the problem is in the bluetooth version of my phone?

Synchronizing the phone as a Palm device with Palm Desktop doesn't work, since there is no palm OS on the T39. But I can drag and drop vCard and vCalendar files direct from the Palm Desktop onto the Bluetooth File Exchange application, as long they are not to big, which results in a bazerk phone.

Since Apple does collaborate now with Sony Ericsson, maybe we will see an application that supports all the functions of the nice phones. And I have some money at hand for the first developer that fixes us a nice application that will sync our phones through Bluetooth.
As submitted from Holland by Jacco, with some minor formatting and edits (with Jacco's permission) by yours truly...

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