Bluetooth Wireless Access Points

[AndrewP]

I'm migrating to the Treo 650 from a wifi-enabled TH55 and I'm used to downloading my email to the TH55 via wifi before going into work. Including spam, I typically download about 250kB of data so any GPRS-based price plan here in the UK is simply prohibitive.

I notice that you can buy Bluetooth wireless access points that plug into your LAN. These are relatively cheap and the two I've seen are the Belkin F8T030uk and the D-Link DBT-900AP.

Is it possible to configure the Treo 650 to link to a bluetooth wireless access point so that I can download all my email without using the GPRS?

Thanks,

Andrew

[AndrewP]

At the risk of poor netiquette, I'm going to confirm that you can use a Bluetooth access point to surf the web, download mail, without using GPRS with a Treo 650.

First of all, I believe that I have an unlocked Treo 650 - it came as part of an O2 contract, but seems happy enough with a Vodafone SIM in it. Ergo, it's unlocked.

I purchased a Belkin Bluetooth Access Point F8T030 from a seller on Amazon.co.uk for just under GBP40 inc postage. That was quite a saving as most online stores are charging around double that.

Setting it up is straightforward. Plug the AP into your LAN, insert power lead and 30s later you are in business. At this point, the AP has taken an IP address from your DHCP server, so once you've found the address, you can simply http://192.168.0.xxx in your web browser to do a quick bit of configuration, e.g static IP address, subnet mask, gateway, DNS server, change passkey from default.

At this point, I tried pairing with the Treo 650 and it failed...and again...and again. So I tried instead with my Clie TH55 and, bugger, it worked - I was able to surf just fine. At this point, I'm thinking that Palm have blocked LAN access. Gits.

Undaunted, I started surfing through all the menu options on the Access Point and discovered under "Bluetooth > Settings" an option called "PAN profile" which was set to "ON". I remembered reading something about that the AP had to support a LAN profile not PAN, so I turned the "PAN profile" "OFF". Bingo - I successfully paired.

Ready to rock, I start up Blazer and nothing happens - no pages. And my TH55 is still happily downloading away. More footering through menus and discover "Preferences > Advances > Set Proxy" and "Use default carrier proxy" is ticked. Untick.....and we are in business. It works like a dream.

So to summarise the key points.
i) Belkin Bluetooth Access Point F8T030 works fine.
ii) Make sure you have the PAN profile turned off on the AP.
iii) Make sure you have the Default carrier proxy option turned off in Blazer
iv) Not too sure if the Treo 650 has to be unlocked.