Solo Technology

After fighting the urge for a few weeks, I succumbed today and bought a Bluetooth headset. The Motorola H350, to be exact. It’s primary qualification? The price really — I’m not quite ready to spend 100’s of dollars on this stuff quite yet and, well, this was the cheapest on the shelves.

At the same time, I bought an IOGEAR USB Bluetooth adapter. It goes into my laptop and allows me to pair the headset with the assorted Internet phone applications I’m running. These two items combined set me back about $60 — and so far I’m pleased with both.

This little buying spree caused me to (very pleasantly) spend several hours this afternoon “playing around.” (or geeking out) I’ve never actually owned any interesting Bluetooth stuff so I just had to experiment. For instance, with the new USB adapter, I now have interesting ways to let my iPAQ PocketPC interact with my laptop.

While I actually bought this stuff to use with my laptop, it didn’t take me very long to pair the headset with my Razr cellphone. Now I can be one of the cool dads at the soccer games. Wheee!

Next, I blew at least an hour trying to get it to pair to the iPAQ. Pairing goes fine, but I can’t seem to convince the iPAQ to send any sound to it. Seems that’s just not an option with my model iPAQ (and yes, I tried the registry hacks). I’m not giving up quite yet, but not looking good.

I wrassled a bit with Skype, but fortunately it wasn’t too long before I had it working well with the new headset. Now I can wait for calls without feeling nearly so “tethered” to my desk. I wandered about the house while doing the Skype test calls and am happy with the range.

Speaking of Skype and the iPAQ: I also found the mobile version of Skype… I installed it on my iPAQ (copied the installer over via Bluetooth no less!) and now I have a “mobile telephone” to use wherever I have a Wi-Fi signal. Fun stuff!

It actually works far better than I anticipated, considering my iPAQ 4355 must be a 4 (or 5?) year old model. I more or less hold it like a phone (granted, a rather wide and skinny phone…) and it works tolerably well. I wish I had a bit more mic. level control though.

Some days it’s fun to just play with stuff, you know?

One Response to “Bluetooth Bonanza”

1. » pingback » For Want of Drivers… » Solo Technology on August 19th, 2007 1:42 pm
   
   

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