Hello everyone,

I recently purchased an 8700g and was a bit disappointed with the s/w support (I'm mainly a Nokia user and have an N70 and E61 also). I'd like to ask whether RIM will ever introduce support for non Microsoft BT stack for device synching. All recent laptops have integrated BT support. Each brand introduces his own. I have for ex. 2 hp laptops, one is a recent nx9420. I have already hacked into the bth.inf file and added the ID of my laptop's BT device and uninstalled the HP BT stack (I am also an IT Manager and developer). Naturally the BT synching then works and my BB is recognised paired and added and the "enable BT support" option is ungreyed. However, the MS BT support is very limited and won't see all the services for example in my Nokia N70 or E61 phones (OBEX file transfer, etc). Obviously I re-installed the original HP BT stack and all is well again with my other devices.

My question is why doesn't RIM invest in supporting all possible BT stacks like Nokia does? I believe this is possible with just a little investment and will - it would help. Ok, you can sync with the USB cable, but hey, come on. And what about file OBEX transfer? Will this every be possible?

Maybe I missed something?

Thanks for any feedback.

I'm not sure what you mean by non-MS BT stack, as the devices have a Java OS, but perhaps this explanation will help.

OS <= 4.2 have no (exposed) OBEX services, they only support SPP serial port profile.

OS >= 4.2.1 have support for jsr-82 javax.bluetooth and javax.obex specifications.

You may find an upgrade for your device to 4.2.1 shortly, which would enable the use of such services, but there is little functionality that comes out of the box.

For one of our customers, we did develop an implementation of the OBEX File Transfer profile, and it was able to sync files between Windows Mobile and BlackBerry 4.2.1 devices.

Hopefully that helps, if you can ask a more specific question perhaps I can help you further.

Kevin,
thanks for the quick reply.

Specifically I was referring to the laptop/Windows BT side. The BB Desktop manager will synch the BB device (via BT) only if the PC runs the Microsoft BT stack - otherwise it won't even enable the Bluetooth support (the option remains greyed) as it doesn't recognise any BT support. So this means you have to manually hack the OEM bluetooth driver and make it work with the Microsoft BT stack (only with WIDCOMM devices though). So what I meant was if there will be an upgrade for the BB Desktop manager so that it will work with any BT stack and not only the MS one.

I'm glad that an upgrade for the BB OS will be available though with OBEX features.

Thanks for your feedback.

I am wondering the same thing. I use an IBM ThinkPad and its built in bluetooth solution will only work with the WIDCOMM stack. The WIDCOMM stack is far and away superior to the native WinXP SP2 bluetooth stack in any case. I don't know why RIM will not support it.

If you want to have some small hope, submit a product suggestion to . Supposedly they actually read these, and if they hear the same thing from enough people, perhaps they will do something about it.