Here I am again, trying not to go to bed angry after having spent several hours battling to get my technology to do something that should be dead-simple.
I just got a Bluetooth USB dongle for my laptop, so I can send photos to it from my phone more easily. Setting up Bluetooth on both the phone and the laptop seem quite easy–until I get to the point where each is asking for some sort of passcode.
From the documentation of both the phone and the laptop Bluetooth software (each of which seems to have been written from the assumption that the user already understands everything that it might try to explain), this seems quite simple. All I have to do is enter into each device the passcode that I had already somehow entered into the other one first. And each blissfully directs me to the documentation for the other to find out what that is.
I have, as usual, no frakkin’ clue whatsoever what they are assuming that I know how to do.
So right now, I’m stuck in a classic deadly embrace, with a phone and a computer that are each saying “After you, sir,” to the other.
It’s a Nokia 6102i phone and a Kensington Bluetooth USB Adapter 2.0 under Windows XP. Is there a way to get this crap to work, or do I have to wait to reincarnate so that, like just about everyone under 40 seems to be, I will be born knowing how all these cryptic toys work?
By the way, it’s incredibly maddening that there are two different standards for numeric keypads out there. The one for my phone has “1 2 3″ on the top row, while computer keypads have “7 8 9″ there. Since I often remember PINs and passcodes more by the muscle memory of how I type them than by what they are written out, it makes entering the same passcode on the computer and the phone quite difficult. I suspect that this is an accident of history, from when people were designing adding machines and telephones without a thought of interoperability (though didn’t telephone keypads happen long after adding machines were around?).
I suspect that that’s just one of those things that almost nobody notices or cares about. But I find that it makes switching gears from using the keypads on, for example, the telephones to the cash registers at work (as well as, of course, the brain-dead design of this Bluetooth setup) really maddening.
John Cowan | January 4, 2007 - י"ד טבת תשס"ז at 8:30 am | Permalink
Telephone keypads were designed to be like telephone dials (which I remember, so you must too), with the 1 on the top and the 0 on the bottom. And dials were designed that way so that dialing 1 (or rather letting go after you dialed it) would transmit one click, and dialing 0 would transmit ten clicks. When area codes were assigned, long after the design of dials, AT&T made a point of assigning low-click-count area codes to populous places: hence New York got 212 (five clicks), L.A. got 213 (six clicks), and Chicago got 312 (also six clicks).
When push-button keypads were first being worked on, Bell Labs folks experimented with using accounting-type dial keypads, and also investigated having large buttons with no “whitespace” between them. The latter design worked much better (it’s harder for the finger to slip off a larger button), but was inexplicably rejected by the PHBs of the day.
ObTrivia: the original design of the Touch-Tone keypad allowed for a fourth column of buttons; these were never used on the public network, but were used on the DoD network to allow high-priority callers to boot lower ones from scarce trunk lines.
ima | January 4, 2007 - י"ד טבת תשס"ז at 7:55 pm | Permalink
Was John`s explanation of any help to you?
Ima
Ron Fischer | January 4, 2007 - י"ד טבת תשס"ז at 10:44 pm | Permalink
Bluetooth was a latecomer to XP. Even today Microsoft doesn’t provide a complete stack of protocols. You depend on your dongle vendor to fill the gaps. Some do it well. I think Kensington is a good brand.
Make sure Bluetooth is turned on on both devices and the phone is set to be discoverable. Ask PC to find devices. When you see phone, pair with it. Phone should pop dialog about someone wanting to pair, give password to phone and say yes. PC should then say device wants password to pair up, give it same one. After this your phone should appear in list of paired devices on me PC. Phone probably supports showing your PC its file system.
You could pair in the other direction, but I doubt a PC has service profiles the phone will find interesting.
So remember pairing is not symmetric it’s about seeing the service profiles on one device from another. You pair to something whose services you want to use. Pairing goes: search, select device to pair with, share passwords & accept on both sides.
Also check Kensington web site support.
Luck!
Ron Fischer | January 5, 2007 - ט"ו טבת תשס"ז at 1:45 pm | Permalink
Recalling more details. Phone’s bluetooth password is probably just configured once by you. When you discover, select & pair to the phone from the PC the phone may or may not ask you to confirm depending on how bluetooth is configured.
Bill Bowman | January 5, 2007 - ט"ו טבת תשס"ז at 2:57 pm | Permalink
I once had a bluetooth on my dongle and let me tell you, that hurt like the dickens.