Bluetooth Tungsten T3

I've been meaning to do more playing with Bluetooth capabilities of my Palm Tungsten T3 (other than just connecting to another Palm device), so I finally bought a Belkin F8T001 USB Bluetooth adapter (available on Buy.com for about $40 with free shipping).

Installing the Belkin software on my Win2000 system was straightforward, as was pairing my device with the desktop. What was not easy to figure out what sharing the internet connection so I can run e-mail and web browser on the Tungsten. The Belkin software wizard led me to turn on Internet Connection Sharing within Windows, but it gave a warning about setting the LAN adapter to 192.168.0.1 — sure enough, that's what it did. My mistake here was turning on sharing for the Bluetooth network rather than the LAN. Makes sense when you think about it, but not obvious I guess.

The best source I found for getting this whole thing working was Dean Johnson's Palm Bluetooth Internet Setup. This is a great guide with pictures (I love pictures!) and includes some of the more esoteric stuff for setting up PPP. Highly recommended.

So far it works fine, but the speed isn't great. Doing a rough test I get about 30 kbps to a local server. Using a Bluetooth access point I can get about 210 kbps which is much better.

Posted in: PDA