Going "Wireless": Bluetooth

I purchased a Sphinx PICO Bluetooth card from Adriano Angelillis for €29.20 including postage to New Zealand from (presumably) somewhere in Europe.

The instructions (www.40Hz.org) for installing the requisite software on the Newton was quite straightforward. Some of the jargon associated with the Bluetooth technology such as "services", "discovering" and "pairing" was new but not so obscure that one could not infer their meaning.

Blunt only supports two services: serial port services and OBEX services. So far, I have only used the OBEX services to transfer individual notes and entries from Names. On the wiki it says that multiple Names can be transferred by selecting several entries but I found this to be unreliable. Only the first entry was ever sent and after multiple attempts, the selected entries were corrupted and showed up as "Untitled Companies"! Rather unnerving. Fortunately I had the database previously backed up.

After reading the instructions for Apple users, transferring multiple objects looks a lot simpler for them.

Nonetheless, I am relieved that the Bluetooth connection reduces the number of times that I have to connect the serial cable to the Newton. Apparently the serial port is a known weakness in the hardware design and according to the more experienced users, it inevitably parts from the motherboard with frequent use.

The Bluetooth card has been installed for a couple of weeks now and I'm probably transferring something every couple of days.

I have just been reading Eckhart Koppen's blog on his web site and it appears that he is making good progress on the second version of Blunt. Hopefully he will be implementing more services.

I met the Second Secretary of the Israeli Embassy based in Canberra on Saturday. He was keen to see a demonstration of the Newton having just purchased a Hewlett-Packard RX 1710. Upon pulling out my Bluetooth, he expressed his surprise that the platform supported Bluetooth given the age of the technology.