Is my phone’s Bluetooth any use?

Q  Having failed some months ago to get my Sony Ericsson T280i phone and my Windows 7 computer to talk to each other, I was happy to find your Bluetooth article and sat down to try again.

Everything starts well: the phone sees the computer; the computer sees the phone; the passcode doesn’t produce any error messages; the phone appears in Devices and Printers and the computer appears on the phone’s screen. But there the good news ends.

The phone’s Bluetooth symbol stays resolutely off, which it doesn’t when connected to my car’s Bluetooth, and the phone doesn’t appear in Computer, Device Manager or, as far as I can see, anywhere else.

I know the T280i is a low-end phone, and maybe the Bluetooth is a bit sparse as well? Any thoughts would be welcome.
Simon Rutter

A  It’s an ageing phone and we no longer have one in the office or labs, so we can’t test the Bluetooth capabilities ourselves.

However, we did locate the manual and, so far as we can tell (it probably won’t surprise you to hear that the handset’s instructions aren’t terribly good), the T280i’s Bluetooth capabilities extend only to sending or receiving items to or from other Bluetooth phones or connecting to Bluetooth hands-free equipment, such as a headset or your car’s own apparatus.

It doesn’t seem to offer any data-exchange tools so, if you were hoping to use Bluetooth to synchronise contacts with your PC, it looks like you are out of luck.

As you have discovered, it is possible to pair the handset with your PC because that is little more than a ‘handshaking’ process. However, once that handshake is done, the phone and PC are unable to do anything useful with the connection so that is that – consider it a virtual shrug of the shoulders.