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How to keep bluetooth on when enabling/disabling airplane mode

cdl

Android Enthusiast
Feb 4, 2010
448
60
Typically enabling airplane mode automatically disables bluetooth, but there are situations when one may want to leave it on, e.g. when using bluetooth headsets to listen to music, or when you are enabling and disabling airplane mode in order to try to reconnect to the network again (it should be automatic, but in areas with poor signal I find that doing it manually helps).

To change this, you need to be rooted and modify the file
setting.db
in
/data/data/com.android.providers.settings/databases/

I used Root Explorer and SQLite editor, but there may well be other apps.

I modified the entries:
airplane_mode_radios removing bluetooth from the values
and
airplane_mode_toggleable_radios adding the value bluetooth

On my Galaxy Note 2 (rooted, unlocked, running GingerBread) the former was
cell,bluetooth,wifi,wimax
and the latter
wifi

I haven't tried it on other phones but I assume it should be the same - which is why I am posting on this general forum.
An alternative method is also described here.

I find this solution particularly useful when I am in areas with a poor coverage and tend to lose the data connection quite often. In those cases, I try to restart the connection using one of these two aspps:

Restart Connections
Connection Checker

They do pretty much the same thing, but the former is entirely manual, whereas the latter can be programmed to check the connection every x minutes, and enable/disable airplane mode if there's none. Since I always use bluetooth, this way I don't have to reconnect my headset every time.

It would be interesting if you could confirm whether this works on another phones, too.
 

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