Motorola Timeport 270C and Bluetooth Connectivity Kit

Motorola Timeport 270c Digital Wireless Telephone and Bluetooth Connectivity Kit

Cutting Baby Blue Teeth

By Janet Pinkerton

Motorola’s tri-band CDMA Timeport 270c is a very nice Web-browsing mobile phone, discretely positioned as an early adopter’s plaything. It is the only Motorola phone compatible with Motorola Bluetooth Connectivity kit. Theoretically, one Bluetooth device should talk to another within 10 meters of each other, no matter the make or model, to support an appropriate connection between the two. The idea is to eliminate wires between mobile phone and laptop, between mobile phone and mobile phone headset, even between laptop and printer. (See this month’s E-Gear What Is Bluetooth? column on page 94.) The Motorola Bluetooth Connectivity Kit gives you two tiny RF radios that can talk to each other, a Bluetooth PC accessory card modem that plugs into your laptop and a battery door cover with an embedded Bluetooth radio chipset that clips on to the back of the Timeport 270c. A Bluetooth Software Suite CD-ROM contains software to help the computer laptop talk to the Bluetooth-enabled PC Card and help the card talk to the Timeport 270c and also StarFish TrueSync for synchronizing contact and schedule information between laptop and phone.

You have to load the software and device drivers onto your laptop, get your laptop to communicate with the Motorola PC Card, configure your Internet, fax and TrueSync software to use the PC card, and then get the PC Card to discover and bond with the phone to establish the connection.

After I installed the Bluetooth software, Bluetooth Neighborhood icon appeared on my desktop to allow me to monitor and connect with Bluetooth devices within range of my laptop, listing the devices in the neighborhood, their class, their status (in range or not) and whether or not they are communicating with the computer.

I initiated a connection by dragging the dial-up network (DUN) icon onto the Motorola phone entry in the Bluetooth Neighborhood box. When prompted, I entered the same four-digit numeric code into the phone and the laptop to seal the bond between the devices.

After bonding, the computer attempts to establish a wireless network connection with the phone, and the message “0050CD1198AE Requests Local Service?” appears on my phone display. 0050CD1198AE is the Bluetooth identity of my computer laptop. I had the option to grant or deny the request. Granting it, with the punch of a soft key button on the 270c, allows the computer to talk to and use the phone.

The value of the Bluetooth connection varied by application. Syncing contact and schedule information between the laptop and the Timeport 270c was easy via Bluetooth—a purposeful elimination of wires. Surfing the ‘Net by using Bluetooth to connect the laptop and digital mobile phone wasn’t as easy or as effective. I had to reprogram my laptop’s Internet Explorer advanced settings to dial into a Netaxs Internet Access account via the wireless bridge between the PC Card and the Timeport 270c. I initiated the Bluetooth connection via the Bluetooth Neighborhood dialog box and then initiated a dial-up connection into Netaxs via the Timeport 270c.

Surfing the Web is painful at 14.4K, unless you are checking attachment-less e-mail or viewing text-only pages. The 14.4K bottleneck was a function of the Timeport 270′s connection to the Verizon Wireless network, not Bluetooth (which can support 1 mbps).

To fax, you drag a different FAX local service icon onto the Motorola Phone entry in the Bluetooth Neighborhood box to establish a connection to the Timeport 270c. My laptop’s QuickLink III software balked at using the Motorola Phone Modem, however.

Throughout this review, the Timeport 270c worked fine, displaying clear prompts about the status of the Bluetooth connection.

This fall Motorola will start to sell a Bluetooth wireless headset priced at under $200 for use with the 270c—possibly the best Bluetooth application yet.