Sidekick 3 Bluetooth Services 411: T-Mobile Sidekick 3 Has Crippled Bluetooth Services   - 13,366 Views, 1 Comment

Now don’t get me wrong - I adore my new T-Mobile Sidekick 3 (and remember, please, it’s not a Sidekick III, it’s a Sidekick 3!) - and I am thrilled beyond words that they finally added bluetooth to it. Yay!

And the bluetooth is nice and clear with my Jabra 250, although, as I said in my side by side comparison and review of the T-Mobile Sidekick 3, it doesn’t have voice dialing.

But it doesn’t stop there. Because it also doesn’t have any of the standard bluetooth services which you can get on pretty much any bluetooth-enabled phone now. Such as, you know, file transfer!

In fact, the only bluetooth services offered by the T Mobile Sidekick 3 are Voice Gateway and OBEX Object Push.

That’s right, the only think that you can do with your Sidekick 3’s bluetooth are listen to calls, and send a vcard.

Period.

And you can’t even listen to calls on some bluetooth headsets! For example, while the Sidekick3 paired beautifully with my Jabra 250, and has a lovely clear connection, it doesn’t play nicely with my new Jabra 620s Stereo bluetooth headset. So hey, I have MP3 music on my bluetooth Sidekick now, but can’t use my bluetooth stereo headset to listen to it!

And if you want to use your Sidekick to connect another device via bluetooth to the Internet, well, forget it.

Yeesh!

By contrast, my Sony 600w phone offers the following bluetooth services:

Dial-up Networking, Serial Port, HF Voice Gateway, HS Voice Gateway, OBEX Object Push, OBEX File Transfer, OBEX SyncML Client, OBX IrMC Sync Server, NAP service, and Mouse & Keyboard.

I had so wanted to let the new Sidekick 3 be my one device. I really thought this would be it. But with the crippled bluetooth offering, I guess I’ll still be carrying two devices.

Of course, if anybody out there knows how to get around this, let us know!