Smartphone and Vista: "Look Ma, No USB!"

Recently I posted about how the Bluetooth connectivity to the new Windows Vista Device Center had been disabled by Microsoft in response to security concerns by corporate customers. That was partially inaccurate.

You can connect your SmartPhone to Windows Vista with Bluetooth (assuming of course you have a Bluetooth radio USB dongle on your desktop PC). The process is a bit weird, but hopefully this explanation will help:

1) First you have to enable Bluetooth on your device and make it "Discoverable".
2) On your desktop machine, in Control Panel, in "Bluetooth Devices" you need to add your device. The following pics show a successful add:












Now all you need to do is go into the Device Center main screen, click on your device, and it will say "Waiting for device to connect". You may also need to go into the BlueTooth setup on your device and make it connect. A passkey is recommended, and once you fill that in on your device, you should see "Connected" on your desktop.

At that point, you can sync, sync media files, or just browse the filesystem on your device and copy files back and forth like Windows Explorer, all using the features of the Windows Mobile Device Center.

I wish there were clearer instructions on how to do this that came with the product, but so far I haven't found them.

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