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May of Klang Valley, Malaysia wrote:

I picked up a USB Bluetooth dongle, “Tiny Tech” brand, to connect to my Nokia 6230i. Took me a couple of hours installing the driver from the little CD that came with it. Sometimes the dongle could detect the phone, sometimes it couldn’t. And when it did, it couldn’t quite connect. Even after pairing. Even after typing in a passkey. Even after checking and re-checking all the configuration on both the phone, the Nokia PC Suite, and re-installing the supposedly BlueSoleil application for the Bluetooth dongle (the dongle’s not a BlueSoleil product, though).

I tried to connect to my colleague’s SonyEricsson phone to see if the dongle would work with hers instead. Phone to phone, yes. Phone to my PDA, yes. PDA to my phone, yes. Anything to my PC / dongle… No.

Serves me right for picking up a no-name dongle. I think I’ll pop by the shop again and see if I could exchange it for a so-called better one. I’ll definitely pick up a so-called better one next time, like Belkin (a whopping RM199!).

Any recommendations?

Well May later confirmed that she was running Microsoft Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 2 (SP2) installed on a Dell Latitude with USB 1.1 ports. There are a few factors involved here, so let’s take a look at them one at a time.

Firstly, the problem with SP2 is that Microsoft decided to include its own set of drivers for bluetooth devices. And unfortunately, neither Tiny Tech nor BlueSoleil was listed as a supported bluetooth device. So what you can do is try disabling Microsoft’s own built-in bluetooth drivers by force, and use the one that comes with the dongle. Microsoft provided some instructions on how to do this here. Remember that this applies to Windows XP SP2 only. Don’t worry, you can change everything back to the way it was by repeating the whole process in reverse.

Secondly, it could be a hardware problem. May mentioned that she was using the dongle in a USB 1.1 port. The dongle might not be getting enough power from it, so you should unplug any other USB devices and try using the dongle again. It may help if you were using a powered USB hub.

Thirdly, it could be a software issue. There might be a combination of hardware combinations that the software May is using might have trouble working with. As of writing, the latest version of BlueSoleil Bluetooth Application is 1.6.1.4 (UPDATE: 2.1.3 has been released on April 29th) for Windows XP. Nokia has also released version 6.7 of their PC Suite software for the 6230i and upon my further investigation, has added support for the “IVT BlueSoleil Bluetooh stack for Windows XP”, which is what seem to be suitable for May’s dongle.

So May, I think you’d want to try out that last option first.

If it works, you’ve just saved yourself RM199.

Good luck.