Bluetooth - On your laptop, handheld and beyond

For those of you who are starting to get into Bluetooth devices, say a new Bluetooth (BT) mouse or handheld PocketPC, you may quickly discover some of the short comings of these devices. Some of the issues you may encounter are inability to connect to the device, poor connectivity, and overall poor performance. I currently use a Dell Precision M60, IOGear Cordless BT Mouse, Sony Ericsson T637 and a Dell Axim v50 PocketPC - all of which rely on BT to communicate wirelessly. With a default setup, out of the box type of approach, connecting these devices was a touchy situation - if the device is able to be discovered, I would encounter poor performance/connectivity and typically not be able to re-connect the device in the future.

[Solution]

This solution isn't much of a 'magical fix' but more of a best practice. I'll go through each device:

Dell Precision M60 Laptop: With the Dell laptop, by default, you are using the Windows XP BT drivers (read: BT stack) and there in is the problem. The first thing I would suggest is to update the drivers via Dell's support site - in my case it was the Dell TrueMobile drivers. After installation there was a huge jump the connection quality and overall connectivity with my BT devices. I also disabled the power saving options for this device, so that Windows was unable to shut down the device, as I had problems with the BT device not coming back after I shut my laptop (putting it into standby mode)

IOGear BT Mouse: Simple - fresh batteries all the time. This little guy just needs juice - if you are getting poor performance, change (or recharge) the batteries

Sony Ericsson T637: This one was a bit more intensive and required that I update the firmware for the phone (which requires special hardware, called a Terminator). Check back later for a step by step on this.

Dell Axim v50 PocketPC: Again, by default, the drivers that ship with the Axim are less than satisfactory. You need to first update your devices ROM (I went from A01 to A09 - available from Dell's support site) which made a huge difference across the board. The next step is to install the necessary 3rd party BT drivers/stack for peripherals (such as a keyboard).

[Review]

To say that BT is a robust technology would be a stretch, but at least it's possible (with the right updated drivers) to get good use out of your BT devices.