bluetooth

I had a nightmare trying to connect my Nokia 3650 to my PC running XP. The adapter comes with Widcomm Bluetooth software 1.2.2.18. There was no update available from the Hawking's website. Installing the software and the bluetooth adapter was straight forward. However, trying to get a connection established between the PC and the phone was a huge ordeal. Every time I initiated a connection and enter all the passcodes, I get an error message saying the phone disconnected. There is no explaination why this error occured. When I tried to reconnect, I get another error message. It took me a while to realize I needed to unpair both the phone and the pc before a new connection will work. I tried connecting from the pc, the phone and reinstalling the software. Nothing worked. During the reinstall, windows couldn't find bluetooth device driver. Pointing windows to the cdrom didn't work. Only pointing it to c:/windows/system32 got me past that one. After pulling my hair out for 5 hours, I finally found the solution using a google search.

1. unpair the phone and pc
2. find the COM port used in the bluetooth setup->config->local services->bluetooth serial port
3. configure mRouter to use the COM port found above
4. connect/pair the phone and pc
5. you still get the connect error message
6. start PC Suite

Steps 2 and 3 are very important. Once I did all that, the connection worked. I don't know if the problem was because of the phone or Widcomm's software, but I got it to work. I hope this helps anyone else who may encounter the same problem.

I wasn't too impressed with this dongle, which is why I turned around and sold it. Bottomline: it installed simply in WinXP, and did connect to my Palm Tungsten successfully. But Bluetooth is just not ready for prime time. Which I suppose is not the fault of this HT adapter, but the fault of the IEEE. However, as far as this product goes, the software worked very well and the signal strength in my apartment was always good. The constant need to validate connection on both the handheld and the PC was the deal breaker for me. If I'm 25 feet away and want to access an email or webpage, it's a massive pain in the backside to have to get up and walk over to the computer in order to accept the BT connection. And it entirely defeats the purpose of having a wireless device in the first place!

I bought the dongle to use with my nokia 3650. The supplied driver version is 1.4.2.10. The setup took minutes and it worked fine on both Windows XP professional and Win98SE desktops. However, within a few weeks, the drivers stops working, prompting "Bluetooth license check failed." Hawkings support has not returned my emails after two weeks.