OK, I know I'm not the only person trying to do this, but I do seem to be one of the very few who have succeeded. That is, getting a Nokia 3650 or 7650 and Nokia PC Suite to talk to each other using a Belkin (or any other) USB Bluetooth adapter. So I guess I have a duty to record how it's done. Read on...
These steps are based on the instructions I found for the 7650 here. But there are a couple of wrinkles to this that make it worth writing out in full.
First, pair the phone and the PC using the usual steps. Tell the phone to treat the PC as "authorized". Install Nokia PC Suite on the PC, but don't run it yet. If you have the phone's serial port in "My Bluetooth Places" already, delete it.
Now, here's the fun part. Open the Bluetooth configuration dialog (right-click the bluetooth icon in the system tray to get to this via the popup menu.) Choose the "Local Services" tab. Ignore the fact that there is already a "Bluetooth Serial Port" entry here and create another one using the "Add Serial Service" button. Remember the COM port you chose here (A).
Next, go to the "Client Applications" tab and (again) ignore the existing serial port entry and create a new one using the "Add COM Port" button. Remember the name you chose for the new port (B).
Go to "My Bluetooth Places" and create a new place, using the COM port you just created (B) and connected to your phone (C).
Next, right click the "mRouter" icon in the System Tray (it's the one with two separated grey triangles) and choose "Properties". You will see a list of COM ports. Check the COM port you chose for the "Local Services" tab (A).
OK, so that's the setup done. Now, here are the steps you need to follow each time you want to connect.
Go to "My Bluetooth Places", right click the serial port entry you created (C) and choose "Connect". The first time, you will get a dialog telling you that "The Bluetooth serial port COM0 will be used...". Oh no it won't. You can ignore this and it is probably best to check "Do not display this message again". You will also get a dialog telling you that the "Remote device closed the connection". You just have to ignore this - you can't make it go away.
Finally, you should now be able to launch Nokia PC Suite, and it should connect and (the first time through) prompt you to choose a name to refer to your phone.
The basic theory of operation here is this: the way Nokia expects the phone and PC suite to communicate is that a connection is initially opened from the PC to the phone. The phone then closes the connection and opens up a connection back from the PC to the phone. The COM port you check in the "mRouter" properties is not the port that PC suite uses to connect to the phone, as you might expect, but the port that PC suite uses to listen for the incoming connection. That's why the port you choose in "Local Services" (A) - an incoming port - is the one you check in the mRouter properties. This really should work using the ports that Bluetooth config has by default, but doesn't - and creating new serial ports and making sure you are explicitly making the outbound connection using the new outbound port you created (B) seems to fix it for reasons best known only to Microsoft. This appears to be a consistent problem across many Bluetooth adapters on Windows.
Did I mention that Bluetooth on Windows sucks?
Posted by Mark at June 17, 2003 10:15 PM