Updated: Never — Philip's Blog

[I had never heard of the word "tethering" in this context until I started fiddling with this. Who came up with that silly word?]

After spending an inordinate amount of time getting my contacts into my HTC Hero phone without sharing the contact details of everyone I know with Google, I now want to start doing other useful things with it. Like reading my email.

Unlike "web 2.0" denizens, I'm not prepared to put my brain through a blender or take other drastic measures to reduce its functionality to convince myself that a tiny touchscreen interface is a good way to read email, let alone try to force email through a webserver or a crippled IMAP client. I have a lot of email and a perfectly functional mail client running in a screen somewhere reliable to get to it.

It's been a while since I had to pair a new device with my laptop and I discovered that the dbus-damaged Linux Bluetooth stack has become even more broken of late. It now requires me to run an undocumented bluetooth-agent application, which takes my pin in argv where it can conveniently be seen by anyone else who happens to be using my machine (which is no one, but still, you wonder what kind of people design software like this).

When I finally got the HTC Hero paired with my laptop, I discovered that its Bluetooth stack is more than a little handicapped:

[635] (luggage:/home/philip)# sdptool records 00:23:D4:xx:xx:xx
Service Name: Voice gateway
Service RecHandle: 0x10000
Service Class ID List:
  "Handsfree Audio Gateway" (0x111f)
  "Generic Audio" (0x1203)
Protocol Descriptor List:
  "L2CAP" (0x0100)
  "RFCOMM" (0x0003)
    Channel: 1
Language Base Attr List:
  code_ISO639: 0x656e
  encoding:    0x6a
  base_offset: 0x100
Profile Descriptor List:
  "Handsfree" (0x111e)
    Version: 0x0105

Failed to connect to SDP server on 00:23:D4:xx:xx:xx: Connection refused

Note the conspicuous absense of "Dialup Networking" (0x1103).

How can they sell a (very expensive) "smart phone" in 2009 which doesn't even support the very basics of Bluetooth? I have a feeling they may be running the same tooth-decaying Bluetooth stack as my laptop. How very disingenious.

Time to void my warranty and figure out how to fix this.

Frustration.