LinLog

My order of goodies for my new cell phone came in the other day. For about $75 after shipping, NewEgg sent me a Bluetooth headset, a USB Bluetoothe adapter for my PC, and a 1GB microSD memory card.

The funny thing is, the memory card made me feel old, probably because I'd never actually held a microSD card in my hands before. I mean, I remember the days when 1GB was a good size for PC hard drive. Heck, I even remember, when I was a kid, playing Zaxon off a cassette tape on a Radio Shack brand computer that hooked up to the TV. And now we can fit huge amounts of data on a chip that's literally smaller than my thumb nail. How times have changed....

So far, the news is mixed with the new gadgets. The good part is the microSD card. I basically just stuck it in my phone and it created the appropriate directory structure when I accessed it. I was then able to dump MP3s in the card's mp3 directory and my phone is now a music player. I'll review the phone in greater depth in another post.

The Bluetooth headset is Cardo scala-500. It's a hice headset, works perfectly with my phone, and comes with a whole bunch of little add-ons, including a belt clip, car charger, lanyard, and even a clip to hook it onto your glasses. However, I haven't had a chance to use it in an actual conversation yet.

The Bluetooth adapter, a KINAMAX BT-USB, has given me some problems. The good news is that it Kubuntu detected it right out of the box. The bad news is that I'm not entirely sure what to do with it from there.

Part of the problem is probably that I don't have the first clue about Bluetooth. I know it's a wireless communications protocol popular in cell phones and PDS and...that's about it. I certainly don't know what to do once kbluetooth detects my phone and connects to it.

My original purpose in buying this device was actually to access my phone with BitPIM over Bluetooth. However, it appears that isn't as simple as I'd hoped. From what I've read so far, doing that requires setting up an rfcomm device for the Bluetooth connection, which seems to be a non-automatic command-line affair. I also can't get it to work. Or rather, I can get a connection established and the rfcomm device created, but I can't keep it working long enough for BitPIM to actually complete a data transfer. I suspect this will take some research.