We just bought a new car, which has built in handsfree Bluetooth for a cellphone. We tried to pair it with my wife’s phone (a Palm Treo), but it just wouldn’t work. After lots of attempts, we gave up and called Palm support. They eventually came back and said that the Bluetooth on her Palm was not compatible with the Bluetooth in the car’s system.
I never heard of such of thing. Could that be true? What could they mean?
If true, that’s a serious bummer. Her Palm is also her PDA, and she has tons of stuff on it, so it would be a pain to move it to another phone, and how are we to know if they new phone is compatible anyway?
There are a couple of different versions of Bluetooth and a varying amount of backwards compatibility. To make it even more fun, there are different “profiles” in Bluetooth applications and the Palm might only support one or two of them. For instance, a phone will probably support the profile that allows pairing with a headset, but is unlikely to support pairing for stereo. My smartphone allows stereo, but doesn’t support the profile necessary to talk to a car. There is no standard for Bluetooth yet, so different manufacturers can and do come up with their own profiles. It sucks but until the industry agrees on standards for the different profiles you will run into these issues. It doesn’t help that Palm hasn’t updated their OS in quite some time.
ETA: I feel your pain–there’s also no Bluetooth support for 64 bit operating systems, either, so half our computers can’t talk to our phones.
I’ve never actually seen two Bluetooth devices that could not be paired if they both supported at least one profile. I have an inkling that incompatible Bluetooth might exist somewhere but my guess is that there’s just no compatible profiles between your car and your Palm. Your car might only support HFP (Hands-Free) while your Treo might only support HSP (Headset).
Yes. These “profiles” are different capabilities that the makers of Bluetooth (BT) gear can include, or not, as they desire.
As an example, there’s a BT profile to provide modem functions, and another to give access to a device’s filesystem. The Apple iPhone provides neither. I can activate BT on both it and my computer, and they’ll see each other no problem, but the iPhone provides no services that the computer can use. My old cellphone would let me move images and files to and from it via BT azt will, and I could use it as a modem.
Point–but I wouldn’t have any Apple product on toast and don’t really care to set up a dual boot with Linux just to get Bluetooth support. Therefore, with one box running XP-64 and one running Vista Ultimate 64 Bluetooth is off the menu for half the computers in the house. We can get around it because the media box is running 32 bit Vista and all the files are shared on the network so it gets the BT adapter. I’d really like it if everybody would get into the game and standardize BT profiles to take some of the guesswork out of it–it’s a nifty technology and could be much more useful than it is now.