I got my first Bluetooth-enabled mobile phone this week, a Motorola v551. I’ve been playing with the Linux utilities for working with mobile phones and have assembled some links. Most of the pages out there seem focused on SMS features of a mobile, or using a mobile phone for Internet access for a Linux box. I’m interested in neither, and care more about phone book syncing and transferring files back and forth between the phone itself and a PC.
- Gentoo’s Mobile phone and Bluetooth HOWTO
- Linux + Phone + Bluetooth, the best guide so far on getting the basics set up on the Linux side
- Gnokii, a very nice mobile phone tool
- KDE Bluetooth Framework looks great from the screenshots. I need to give it a try.
- moto4lin — this looks like exactly what I need for my phone. I think I’ll package it for Debian.
There seems to be quite a community built around hacking Motorola phones as well. The Hofo Guide is the authoritative resource.
HowardForums.Com is also a great site.
How timely, I just bought a Motorola E550 and was looking around for the same information. I too am really only interested in phone book sync and file transfer. I don’t need to use my phone for Internet access for SMS or anything like that. Thanks for the helpful links – if I find any good ones, I will comment again.
Gnokii will probably be your best basic bet. KDE has several tools that may be applicable, and if your phone groks SyncML, you may be able to use multisync (+evolution) or kitchensync (+korganizer) to sync your calendar and phonebook.
Why no net access? I use my phone as a modem for linux, it’s quite handy when you’re traveling and you’re outside of wifi country.
And nice at the airports that requre you to pay for wifi too… Especially if you have an unlimited data plan like me… :)
I just got a v551 and I’m trying to get it to sync but I’ve been having a lot of difficulties just trying to get gnokii and others to work on it. I have a feeling that it has something to do with my provider. I have Cingular and I hear that they turned off the dialup networking so I may not have a way to use AT command set to get what I want.
:/
I did get it to work with some of the GSM software, but since the SIM card can’t store enough information (notably, type of number and similar things), I haven’t continued with that much. You have to use the virtual TTY support in Bluetooth for that.
I did get the AT command set to work but never tried dialing out to any ISP.
hi, I tried to setup bluetooth as per the howto. I can find my phone but when I try rfcomm connect my phone prompts me for a pin and then it closes the connection. I set the pin using bluez-pin but can’t seem to get it to work. How did you get your V551 to work? I just want to download my pictures. I know it works because I had it working on windoze.
I’ve been trying to get a couple of photos off my V551 and it’s just not working worth a damm. Maybe because it’s a Cingular phone and they’ve locked it down too damm much?
I can see the phone using kbluetoothd and konquerer and going to bluetooth:/ but I can’t seem to do mucn more than that.
I’m running Linux 2.6.14, Debian heavily updated, though using Gnome and not KDE for my desktop, so it’s not quite integrated with kbluetoothd. Maybe I’ll try that, since moto4lin has locked up it’s process and I’ll probably have to reboot to make the damm thing work.
Sigh… all this to get some stupid photos off the phone. Why do they make it so damm hard!
John