Features

Honeyball: Compaq and Bluetooth and GPRS - "Madness, frustration!"

The Compaq iPaq is a lovely little PDA – fast, effective, good screen, with a good choice of software both built in and available from third parties. The latest, top-of-the-range model, the 3870 , has built in Bluetooth support, which allows you to connect to a Bluetooth enabled phone like the excellent Ericsson T39M. You would expect this to work well, and for it to be seamless and straightforward. It isn't.

The problem comes with making the connection, or partnership, between the iPaq and the T39. This is a mess - the dialog boxes on the iPaq are confusing, littered with irrelevant garbage and are a model of opacity. A few simple help screens would make all the difference.

Secondly, once you have got your iPaq and your T39 to talk to each other, you discover that you need to leave the T39 running in Operation Mode "On" rather than Operation Mode "Automatic", otherwise the T39 wont be able to be woken up by the iPaq when you initiate a call. Naturally, this dramatically increases the power consumption of the T39 and shortens its battery life.

The next area of problem is in the configuring of the iPaq to make a data call. This is really a mess, and makes the Bluetooth configuration look like a walk in the park. The fault here lies with Microsoft, where they have a completely bizarre view on how to set up a connection dialog box in an easy fashion. It reminds me of being in that old maze game: "you are in a maze of twisting passages, all alike". After months of usage, I still can't remember where half the settings are in the dial-up connection dialogues, and this is madness.

The next blame goes to the Telco and ISP. I have GPRS on Orange, which works brilliantly. That's when you can actually get it to work. I received no documentation from Orange on the matter, and there doesn't appear to be any information on their website. By trawling around CIX, I found that the dialstring I needed was *99# as the telephone number, and that I needed to set the CID to "orangeinternet". A friend, armed with identical kit, had his CID set to "orangewap" and thus couldn't make any data calls from his iPaq.

My next gripe goes to the small matter of stability. The Bluetooth stack on the iPaq is fragile and prone to collapsing at the slightest provocation. Turning off the power at the wrong time will ensure that the stack crashes when you restart. There's also a myriad other slip-ups which can cause the Bluetooth stack to die a horrible death. The only solution is to do a soft reset. However, this doesn't clear the Bluetooth hardware in the iPaq every time. Several soft resets are often required.

Finally, there is no software in the iPaq which monitors how much data you have sent and received via your Bluetooth connection. This really matters if you are connecting out via GPRS, because you are billed per kilobyte. A simple counter application would have been helpful. I know I can get the information from the screen of the Ericsson when I disconnect the call, but that's not much help when the phone is in your pocket.

All in all, Bluetooth on iPaq is an object lesson in frustration. Just about every part of it is riddled with complexity, difficulty and instability. That it works at all is almost a miracle. Compaq needs to do a service patch as soon as possible to get stability into the iPaq and its Bluetooth hardware. Microsoft needs to think long and hard about what is required of a proper Bluetooth wireless network connection under Windows CE. And the telcos need to wake up and provide the necessary information to their paying customers. Anything less is simply not good enough.