Crippled
31 October 2006I picked up a Garmin StreetPilot 2820 a few months back and it’s been a great little GPS unit - with one exception. One of the advertised features is Bluetooth compatibility which allows you to make and receive calls through the unit with a Bluetooth enabled phone. This wasn’t a huge draw for me because I have a Bluetooth headset. The benefit would have been in the caller ID display on the GPS which is mounted on my dashboard. The whole point of Bluetooth is the hands free profile which allows me to answer the phone without pulling it out of my purse. The one downside is that you can’t see who is calling ahead of time. I don’t necessarily screen my calls but you get used to a certain level of service with Caller ID.
When I brought the unit home I “paired” it to my phone and headset and had little success in making it work as expected. The biggest problem was that I was unable to see my phonebook. The GPS is supposed to display my existing phone book while it is connected, which it didn’t. No phonebook > no outgoing calls. To add fuel to the fire, I was no longer able to make calls directly from my headset. You can only “pair” the headset to one unit at a time and it had to be either the Garmin or the phone. When the phone and the headset are both paired to the Garmin they cannot be “paired” to each other. The result is that the headset and the phone no longer have a direct connection to one another, so the phonebook would no longer work from the headset. Screwed again. I gave up.
Today I started wondering how I could make Bluetooth work with my phone. There had to be a simple solution and it turns out there was. Bluetooth has different protocols for transporting binary data between devices. One of them is called OBEX (Object Exchange) and it is used to export the address book. Okay, sounds easy enough. How do I enable OBEX? I can’t. Why? Because Verizon Wireless cripples this functionality in all of their phones. Apparently allowing OBEX goes against their business model because if you could transfer files freely you wouldn’t need or want to subscribe to all their useless ring tones and games. I don’t need to copy files or music to my phone. I just want to use my address book with my GPS. Is that really too much to ask? I guess I’ll have to ask myself that question again when my contract is up.