Windows XP Bluetooth Rant: One Year Later

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In my blog from a year ago I ranted about the poor state of bluetooth in Windows at the time, and the pain in syncing my Sony Ericsson P800 phone over bluetooth. Its now 12 months later, XP SP2 has long since shipped, plus S/E have updated their sync software, so I thought I should revisit my scenario.

How I Bluetooth Sync Now

  • I right click on the little arrows on the taskbar and select "Connect to a Bluetooth Phone"
  • The normal XP "Select Bluetooth Device" browser dialog appears, and after about 10 seconds shows my phone, plus any other BT devices in the vicinity of my office.
  • I select my phone, click OK, then in another 10 seconds or so the little P900 icon appears on the taskbar.
  • I right click on it, select Synchronize. (There is an option aot auto-sync but I disabled it)
  • The Synchronize dialog appears, and after another 5-10 seconds I get the Outlook security alert dialog.
  • I have to hit the checkbox and select "10 minutes" and click OK
  • After one to five minutes, the sync finishes. It is faster if I give it focus.

If I walk away from my office out of range, then come back, I have to go through all of this again. It can't even remember my phone.

How I want to Bluetooth Sync

  • Walk up to my machine.
  • Little taskbar icon appears, asks me if I want to sync, click Yes. This is the only user interaction I want to have to do.
  • Syncs

Now that Windows has socket support for bluetooth, this should be possible, but S/E dont seem to want to give me this. My preferred option would be for Exchange Activesync, but that hasnt happened (yet) for Symbian OSes. Contrary to my blog on the subject, I haven't given up on my P800 yet. However if the next generation MS smartphone ships before I can get either a version of PC Suite that meets my above requirements, or better yet Exchange AS on my P800, I will finally switch.