Bluetooth Is The Way To Go

I was just playing around with some pics on my HD2 (more on that later) and I was way too lazy to find the micro-usb wire to connect to my PC so instead I just turned on bluetooth and then I remembered – we never shared bluetooth connectivity with Windows 7 with you guys. Here’s the deal, if you connect your phone to your Win7 PC you get some goodies including the ability to initiate phone calls from your PC, listen to music from your phone on your PC’s speakers, transfers files…well we’ll go through it all in a minute.

For starters, let’s connect them. To pair just turn on bluetooth on your phone and on your PC just type ‘bluetooth’ into the search bar to launch the bluetooth program on your PC if it’s not running already. Put them both into discovery mode and they’ll find each other and just hit ‘connect’. On the phone you’ll then be asked if you want to enable 4 modes – Hands-Free (use this device with a headset or car it for hands free operation), File Transfer (transfer files to and from this device), Bluetooth Networking (share information or connect to the internet) and ActiveSync Over Bluetooth (ActiveSync wirelessly with this device). Check all of those boxes and hit done. Great, now back to the PC and you’ll see file explorer directed you to Control Panel\Hardware and Sound\Devices and Printers and then click on your phone and hit ‘control’ (you may need to hit accept on your phone) and then you’ll see this:

Now the fun begins. Press ‘connect’ on ‘use this computer as a headset or speakerphone…” and then go up to ‘make a call to this number’ and test it out. Your computers mic and speakers will now be active to make a call. Want to listen to the music stored on your phone on your PC? Maybe you just went to a friends house – no need for wires or transferring files. Just check ‘listen to audio from your phone thought this computer’s speakers’ and it works as advertised. And you can also send files to your phone and transfer files from your phone to your PC. There’s even an option to use the phone’s connection to connect to the net. It didn’t work for me but I haven’t applied any of the standard tweaks to enable internet sharing so that’s expected. This setup is very simple and provides a lot of functionality. Of course, you also get to ditch the wires this way. All of the newer phones have this functionality – I know the Tilt 2 and the HD2 have it. I recall it did not work with my Fuze but I don’t know if newer ROMs have extended this functionality. In those cases you can still connect to ActiveSync over blutetooth and transfer files but the phone call and audio extensions are not active. if you test this out share your results. All I can tell you is that I like it a lot:)