No More Talkin’ Blackjack Bluetooth Blues

Thanks to Jay’s Technical Talk I’ve finally got my Cingular Blackjack working with my laptop (Kubuntu) via Bluetooth.

This means I can turn on internet sharing on the phone and get online from my laptop while on the Acela between NY and Boston, without the tether cable.

I’ve got a Dell Latitude D810, running Kubuntu Feisty Fawn, and a cheap IOGear USB Bluetooth adapter, model #GBU221.

The “bluetooth” package in the Ubuntu universe repository is a metapackage which installs the “bluez” utilities – I have that installed as well.

All I had to do to get online via Bluetooth connection was:

1. Start bluetooth on the blackjack, since I don’t normally leave it running
2. Start internet connection sharing on the blackjack
3. On the laptop, do: hcitool scan (this looks for nearby bluetooth devices – note the address of your phone, which is a hexidecimal string like 12:34:56:78:90:ab)
4. Issue the command: sudo pand -c
   
   , using the address discovered above
5. Issue the command: sudo dhclient bnep0

Of course, once you know your phone’s address you can skip step 3.

I also tried the various instructions for tethering to USB and using the Gnome PPP application, but for me this would connect and automatically disconnect. Bluetooth’s preferrable for me anyway as that way I have one less cable to carry.

Now, I want an iPhone

A few weeks ago, my blackjack suddenly decided to reboot itself, and in the process seems to have killed all the registry settings.

In Windows Mobile Terms, it’s like a self-induced frontal lobotomy. My phone no longer knows what applications are installed on it, doesn’t remember how to sync to our exchange server, etc.

After spending two hours last night battling the ActiveSync demons in order to connect my BlackJack to my laptop (in order to install the registry editor and certificate for our exchange server on it), uninstalling and resintalling bluetooth (twice!) in the process, and hacking registry settings to enable ActiveSync to work with our exchange server, I’m done.

Would an iPhone just work, or am I falling into the Apple hype?

Of course, what I really need is an OpenMoko. How long before I can run one of these on Cingular? Can I already?

YouTube Mobile on Cingular BlackJack

Thanks to PPCGeeks.com, I finally have videos from http://m.youtube.com/ streaming on my phone. Yes, I too can watch the skateboarding dog while riding the commuter rail.

Presumably this works with lots of other Windows Mobile based devices as well, but I’ve only tried it on my Cingular BlackJack (aka Samsung i607).

You have to copy some files to the Windows directory on the device (the HTC Streaming Media player and some codecs, I assume) and install two .cab files to associate the file types with launching the streaming player.

Just follow the directions found here: YouTube Streaming Mobile: A “How To” WM5/M6/SP

I found that at Step #1, I couldn’t copy all the files from the zip into the Windows directory on my device – had to leave out the .HTM and the Shortcut – but it doesn’t seem to have mattered.

One difficulty was finding a volume control – the app seems to assume you have a touchscreen, which I have not – but the up and down on the main control wheel / compass thingie work just fine for volume.

Another quirk – full screen mode requires rotating the phone 90 degrees. Guess they were thinking of landscape.

Google Maps for Windows Mobile Smartphone

Google’s maps application is now available for Windows Mobile Smartphone edition based phones, like my Cingular Blackjack (Samsung i607):

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BlackJack Java Unleashed

A few weeks back I was thinking about getting a BlackJack. Well, I did, and I’ve been slowly getting up to speed on its features.

One immediate annoyance was the way Cingular/Samsung have configured the JBlend Java Virtual Machine on the phone. That had to go, or the phone was going back to the store.

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