Russell Beattie

Looking for something else, I stumbled upon this in an All About Symbian forum. I had read before that I could use the Bluetooth connection to my PC as my network connection from my phone instead of GPRS, but was clueless as to how. This thread gives all the details:

Q: i have adsl on my pc. I want to use my bluetooth connection to share the net access that my pc has with then phone. any ideas how i can do that?

A: It's very easy!

Tools, Settings, Connection, Access Points, Options, New Access Point, Use default settings.

Connection name: Bluetooth DSL
Date bearer: GPRS
Access pont name: none
User name: None
Prompt password: No
Password: None (default)
Authentication: Secure
Gateway IP address: 0.0.0.0

Save this and connect your 7650 to the Bluetooth COM-Port. The mRouter Tray-Icon should show now that the device is successfully connected.

Next open the program of your choice (Wireless IRC) an select "Bluetooth DSL" as default connection - that's it!

It works with nearly all programs except the default browser.

I can't wait to get home tonight and try it out!! There will be LOTS of things you can do if it's that easy to access the internet from your phone this way - it really makes the idea of a Bluetooth Hotspot really viable, doesn't it? The forum does say that some apps have trouble using this connection, but that most work.

This opens up LOADS of possibilities. Remember the UPP? Well, if it was running in your task bar as a little mini-http server, it could be listening to connections from your phone. The SyncML app that comes with the phone as well as the Photo Uploading function in the Images app both use Internet Access points exclusively. Connecting to your PC via HTTP and uploading photos and syncing your info would be SWEET and simple to do. I'm super jazzed right now. I hope it works.

I actually meant to post about the photo-app uploading before. It uses https to upload files to a central server. You can sign up for Club Nokia and use their server and there's already a 3rd party website called FotoDock. I really think it's done via a simple http Post with the photos attached as MIME files. This might be an interesting way to Moblog also (instead of the whole email-to-ftp thing).

And also just using Doris - a kick ass little native browser I just downloaded (with a dumb-ass name and logo) - and I'll be able to do some light reading from the couch (with my magnifying glass of course, but still it's the concept, right?). Awesome, awesome, awesome.

By the way, what I was looking for is a way to share out my entire phone's directory structure. Right now from my PC it's a one-way street except for images. I can drop files into the "shared directory" on the phone, and they'll appear in the "inbox" as separate messges (not as files). But the Symbian OS has a file system similar to Windows (ugh) with a c:\, d:\ and z:\ drives (the z:\ drive is read-only ROM). I can use a little file explorer app on the phone to browse the phone's directories, but I can't do this from the PC. The only thing I can do is use the sorry-excuse-for-a-sync-app that Nokia provides to upload my images to my PC, but I can't see any other files (like TEXT!!!). I'm not sure why Nokia is doing this. Just like J2ME, Nokia has cut functionality from the phone for no reason. Symbian includes the capability to run the Personal Java spec, like what's in the SonyEricsson P800, but Nokia cut it out. Arrgh!

I'll figure it out. Man, there's not a day that's gone by yet that I have't discovered something new about this phone! It's not a mobile phone, it's a mobile computing platform, really.

-Russ