Data Plus Services and Bluetooth Compatibility

[vandergraff]

It seems we have a mismatch between the 720 Bluetooth support required to get Dataplus services and industry Bluetooth trends.

The 720 requires Bluetooth DUN to be supported - however Microsoft decided to remove DUN support from Windows Mobile (WM5 onwards) - see

http://blogs.msdn.com/windowsmobile/archive/2007/04/17/why-did-we-remove-bluetooth-dun.aspx

Thus any modern Windows Mobile based phone cannot support Pata plus services...............

Microsoft holds out a slight chance that OEMs could include it in WM6 (however I can confirm that the Blackjack II running WM6 does not support DUN). A better solution would be for TomTom to add support for Internet Connection Sharing in the TomTom Go 720. ICS works great on my Blackjack II to allow my laptop to connect to the Internet through Bluetooth and the Blackjack II.

If TomTom is not planning to add ICS support it suggests to me that they are not serious about future support of the Go x20 series data services - why else disenfranchise all the (growing number) of Windows Mobile based phones from accessing these services?

Do we know if TomTom plans to add ICS support for the Go x20 family?

 

[canderson]

It seems we have a mismatch between the 720 Bluetooth support required to get Dataplus services and industry Bluetooth trends.

The 720 requires Bluetooth DUN to be supported - however Microsoft decided to remove DUN support from Windows Mobile (WM5 onwards) - see

As a house that does development for MS's portable OS products, trust me -- this isn't the first or last time MS will pull a feature that its user base had already come to depend upon.

As for Bluetooth specifically, my own private nightmare -- they don't even acknowledge that a printer could use the Bluetooth serial profile, the one supported pretty much by default by everything except audio devices, and they won't allow WHQL certification (for a signed 2K/XP/Vista driver) of any device that does so... this, in spite of the fact that bluetooth.org says it's OK, and they're supposed to own the standard.

We've gone round and round with MS on what features make sense in portable products, and they seem to sing their own tune no matter what the band is playing. Sorry to hear you got caught. Of course, Palm's OS side of the house hasn't been a bit better.

As for ICS, I believe you're referring to Internet Connection Sharing ... be aware that XP (gee, a Windows product?) doesn't support this, either. I believe it's layered on top of the PAN (Personal Area Network) Bluetooth profile. You think all of that is bad? Palm is, I believe, STILL using OBEX push (like you use for business cards) for ALL of its Bluetooth data exchanges. Talk about warped.

Blaming ANY manufacturer for not trying to keep up with these mobile clowns is unfair. It's the worst bloody moving target game you'll ever play.

IF (IF) the manufacturer of the Bluetooth module that TT is using supports DUN, it's not a horrible job to incorporate it. If not, it would mean trying to add that bit of the stack to the TT firmware -- far less efficient. Will have to have a look at the FCC certs for this thing and see whose "intentional emitter" they're using for BT.

 

[vandergraff]

As a house that does development for MS's portable OS products, trust me -- this isn't the first or last time MS will pull a feature that its user base had already come to depend upon.

As for Bluetooth specifically, my own private nightmare -- they don't even acknowledge that a printer could use the Bluetooth serial profile, the one supported pretty much by default by everything except audio devices, and they won't allow WHQL certification (for a signed 2K/XP/Vista driver) of any device that does so... this, in spite of the fact that bluetooth.org says it's OK, and they're supposed to own the standard.

We've gone round and round with MS on what features make sense in portable products, and they seem to sing their own tune no matter what the band is playing. Sorry to hear you got caught. Of course, Palm's OS side of the house hasn't been a bit better.

As for ICS, I believe you're referring to Internet Connection Sharing ... be aware that XP (gee, a Windows product?) doesn't support this, either. I believe it's layered on top of the PAN (Personal Area Network) Bluetooth profile. You think all of that is bad? Palm is, I believe, STILL using OBEX push (like you use for business cards) for ALL of its Bluetooth data exchanges. Talk about warped.

Blaming ANY manufacturer for not trying to keep up with these mobile clowns is unfair. It's the worst bloody moving target game you'll ever play.

IF (IF) the manufacturer of the Bluetooth module that TT is using supports DUN, it's not a horrible job to incorporate it. If not, it would mean trying to add that bit of the stack to the TT firmware -- far less efficient. Will have to have a look at the FCC certs for this thing and see whose "intentional emitter" they're using for BT.

It just seems the overlap of people with Windows Mobile smart phones and TomTom GPS would be high - the correlation is probably even higher with people who want to use the Dataplus services. Not saying it is right or wrong - but it is very limiting for the future of the Dataplus services on the Go x20 GPS if they stick to DUN.

By the way ICS works fine for me in XP (all I use at home and work) - again you are probably correct in saying it is overlayed on Bluetooth PAN - but frankly that was invisible to me when I set it up using the Bluetooth Network Services supplied with a $25 Bluetooth Adapter. The whole process was fairly simple.

 

[canderson]

By the way ICS works fine for me in XP (all I use at home and work) - again you are probably correct in saying it is overlayed on Bluetooth PAN - but frankly that was invisible to me when I set it up using the Bluetooth Network Services supplied with a $25 Bluetooth Adapter. The whole process was fairly simple.

Your dongle's application came with the PAN (and hence, ICS) support for your PC. XP's (sorry) native BT app (such as it is) doesn't support it.

All we can do is wait and see where this goes. Even as part of the MSDN, it's very difficult to keep up with the decisions being made by the mobile section of Microsoft. Inevitably, there's a call in some API or another that your application absolutely DEPENDS upon, and MS manages to break it between beta and release, or some other such trash. That's assuming they just don't pull it out of the "new" version altogether!

I don't envy the folks at TT when it comes to supporting MS based devices -- or many of the others, for that matter. Just about the time you get something working, they pull a switcheroo. Personally, I can't wait for Mobile 99 or CE 99 or whatever the heck they'll be sending us next (not). It's one of the reasons I (personally) stick with a phone that's a phone and leave it at that for now.