So, as I write this with my ThinkOuside Sierra Bluetooth keyboard attached to my Sony Vaio UX280P, we're in the middle of a quick weekend trip to Eugene, OR.  The drive we had yesterday was about 8 hours in the car and with a few stops, we were in transit for about 10 hours.

That's plenty of time to set up the gadgets for some road entertainment.  This trip, though, was relatively light.  As mentioned, I've got the UX280p and a Bluetooth keyboard.  In addition, I've got my Bluetooth mouse, the Canon SD900 for a light travel point-and-shoot, my Verizon LG VX9800 "The V" handset, my Sprint Ambassador Samsung UpStage handset, a small inverter for some power, and the iGo for powering the UX280p.  In addition, I've got my new, but generic, Bluetooth GPS receiver.  Of course, we have our iPods, too, and MacAlly Bluewave headphones to go with them.

This is nice and all, assuming that it all just works together.  You'll probably have noticed by now that one of the common themes is that most (all?) of the peripherals are Bluetooth enabled. 

I definitely much prefer to have devices without wires.  This is especially welcome in a car environment where wires can get in the way of safe driving. This doesn't remove the need for power wires, of course.  In a car, those often end up being USB, which means more stuff connected to the computer.  In my case, I had one thing charging via USB from the Sony UX USB port, one charging via a DC power port, and another charging via an AC power adapter.  My Honda Accord Hybrid has two DC power ports, which is very useful, but I may have to install a third one in the front center cubby to provide that extra little bit of tidiness to the cables as well as more charging options.

In any case, during the course of our weekend trip we had many issues with many of the Bluetooth devices working well.  Right from the start, I had to remove the GPS pairing and pair it again.  Then Microsoft Streets & Trips kept polling all of the serial ports which would try to pair with a number of phones, a couple of which I still haven't figured out how to pair so errors would keep coming up and this process would ultimately crash Streets & Trips.  I had to remove those pairing attempts before it would connect to the GPS without crashing. 

It finally did get connected, but then software problems and missing features kept it from being all that useful.  Turns out, its an "Essentials" version of the product, so it doesn't support GPS navigation.  It will show directions from your current location if you refresh the planning, but that wasn't quite what I was looking for.  It did show speed and GPS trails, though, which was fine.  Ultimately, it was useful for having a map of where we were as long as we knew where we wanted to go.

Then Laurie tried to pair her new MacAlly Bluewave headphones with her Samsung M610.  This proved to not work at all.  Eventually, we connected it up via an adapter that converted the data port to a regular 3.5mm headphone connector that we connected to the Bluetooth adapter the headphones came with.  This was clumsy, but it proved to work very well and was much more reliable and much easier to setup.

Finally, I was never able to figure out how to pair my Samsung UpStage with the Sony.  No matter which way I tried to pair, the end result was always that the Sony UX never appeared as a trusted device on the Samsung and at every connect attempt there would be an error that said it wasn't authorized as the phone was in "non-pairable mode."  I couldn't find anywhere online what that meant, either.  I had to stick with a Bluetooth connection via my Verizon LG VX9800, which isn't officially supported.  Although it's using minutes, which I used plenty on the drive up, I hope they don't catch on and charge me more. 

A bit off-topic, but the data connection between Weed, CA and Yreka, CA was surprisingly good.  I was able to browse with good speed as well as use GMail and Live Mail without any difficulties even though there wasn't any population in sight.  When I wasn't in the front, I had the Sony UX connected to the side window with the RAM mount I got for it. That worked out very well.

On the way back, we didn't bother to use the Bluetooth GPS or the stereo headphones.  All of those items were safely tucked away.  The only gadget I ended up using was the UpStage to browse the web a little and see if I could buy a couple of songs while on the road.  I was disappointed that the navigation application isn't available for it yet, but we didn't really need it.  Of course, we didn't use any of the devices on the way back because of the hassle of using them.  It's really too bad that Bluetooth is no where near as easy to use as a USB device.  On the flip side, though, you really can say that USB did something right, as it was much better than serial or parallel devices and is still easier than even newer technology. USB devices can also easily be used with multiple machines and devices, which is definitely not the case with Bluetooth devices.  I hope this is resolved sooner than later for Bluetooth or the next wireless technology.

Posted by Shane on April 24, 2007 8:13 AM | Permalink