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Help Bluetooth connection to Win7

CoachWade

Newbie
Dec 21, 2011
25
2
HTC tech support tells me that the Sensation does not have bluetooth drivers for Win7 available, so the phone will pair, but not connect. My experience with it bears out their claims: the phone pairs easily, in a few seconds, but never connects.

Has anyone else managed to get this expensive paperweight to work right? I bought a bluetooth adapter for my laptop so I could use a bluetooth printer and it worked instantly. I try using my top of the line smartphone and... fail.

Any thoughts or advice would be appreciated. Oh, I did try the bluetooth file transfer app from the app market. I got the same response from the phone, unfortunately.

Thanks in advance.

~D.
 
Yep mine works with my Windows 7 laptop (64 bit Professional). But what you can do with it will depend upon what BT profiles are supported by the phone. So I can use it to play music (A2DP profile), act as a headset or handsfree (headset and hands-free profiles) and send files to and from the phone (OPP profile). That is because the Sensation (and Android) supports those profiles.

So, for example, I can send a pdf document to my PC from my phone (or vice versa). To do that I find the file, using a file manager app like Astro, press and hold the document, then choose send and I get the option to send by BT, which I choose. And hey presto it works. And then I can print that document from my PC.

On the BT page in settings my phone shows as being paired, but it is not connected unless and until I do something like the process above, in which case it connects, sends the file and then disconnects.

But AFAIK Android does not have a BT profile (or drivers) for printing direct to a printer. You would need it to use BT HCRP Profile, for anything other than very simple printing, and you would also need the printer's driver on the phone. I am getting to about the end of my technical knowledge here so others may be able to help or explain more (or tell me I am wrong).

AFAIK the only way that you can use a printer direct from the phone (if that is what you are trying to do) is using wifi, and even then you need to use some sort of print service like Google Cloud, Even then as I understand it you will need to go via the PC, unless your printer is Cloudprint ready.
 
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Yep mine works with my Windows 7 laptop (64 bit Professional). But what you can do with it will depend upon what BT profiles are supported by the phone. So I can use it to play music (A2DP profile), act as a headset or handsfree (headset and hands-free profiles) and send files to and from the phone (OPP profile). That is because the Sensation (and Android) supports those profiles.

So, for example, I can send a pdf document to my PC from my phone (or vice versa). To do that I find the file, using a file manager app like Astro, press and hold the document, then choose send and I get the option to send by BT, which I choose. And hey presto it works. And then I can print that document from my PC.

On the BT page in settings my phone shows as being paired, but it is not connected unless and until I do something like the process above, in which case it connects, sends the file and then disconnects.

But AFAIK Android does not have a BT profile (or drivers) for printing direct to a printer. You would need it to use BT HCRP Profile, for anything other than very simple printing, and you would also need the printer's driver on the phone. I am getting to about the end of my technical knowledge here so others may be able to help or explain more (or tell me I am wrong).

AFAIK the only way that you can use a printer direct from the phone (if that is what you are trying to do) is using wifi, and even then you need to use some sort of print service like Google Cloud, Even then as I understand it you will need to go via the PC, unless your printer is Cloudprint ready.


Hey Pete, you the man!

I paired the phone and tried to send a file, but it was "refused" by my laptop. (Again, "paired but not connected".) I'm not really sure what I'm doing wrong.

Any chance you could shoot me a step-by-step on this?

I appreciate it. Thanks!

~D.
 
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Hey Pete, you the man!

I paired the phone and tried to send a file, but it was "refused" by my laptop. (Again, "paired but not connected".) I'm not really sure what I'm doing wrong.

Any chance you could shoot me a step-by-step on this?

I appreciate it. Thanks!

~D.

I will assume you are paired. In that case click on the little up pointing arrow on the right of the Task Bar at the bottom of your screen (that is where it is on my set up). A little panel will come up. Click on the bluetooth icon and choose "show bluetooth devices". Up will come a list of paired devices, which should include your phone. Double click on that and up will come a panel. It will also tell you where you can find any files you have transferred to the PC. In mine it is Documents/Bluetooth exchange folder.

From that you can choose what you want to do with the link. Click on "authorisation options" and then choose "always allow this device to connect for all operations". Now you should be OK. There are various options on the panel to move files etc around.

If you want to move something from the phone to the PC then you do that on the phone as per my previous post. I suggest you keep the panel up on the PC, just in case. The first time I did it both devices required me to confirm it was OK to do.

To be honest moving files via BT is a pain. Why not plug in a USB cable and choose "disk drive", that way you can drag and drop in Explorer on the PC. And if you want to sync things like photos, calendars, contacts, music, etc then choose HTCSync when you plug in, it is so much easier than the rigmarole you have to go though with BT.

As I said before I do not think you are ever going to be able to print direct using BT. That is a limitation of Android, not the Sensation.
 
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I will assume you are paired. In that case click on the little up pointing arrow on the right of the Task Bar at the bottom of your screen (that is where it is on my set up). A little panel will come up. Click on the bluetooth icon and choose "show bluetooth devices". Up will come a list of paired devices, which should include your phone. Double click on that and up will come a panel. It will also tell you where you can find any files you have transferred to the PC. In mine it is Documents/Bluetooth exchange folder.

Paired but not connected. I also get an error on my Win7 computer that there are no drivers for bluetooth peripheral. Strikes me as odd... it doesn't need drivers to connect the phone via USB, because they're contained in the USB driver itself. What's different about bluetooth?

Double clicking on the device (which has a yellow triangle with an exclamation point on it to denote a problem, BTW) brings up a properties box with four tabs: General, Hardware, Services, Bluetooth.

From that you can choose what you want to do with the link. Click on "authorisation options" and then choose "always allow this device to connect for all operations". Now you should be OK. There are various options on the panel to move files etc around.

Can't get that far due to the lack of drivers. I get the error: "Bluetooth peripheral device: no driver found." Now, I got the SAME error on my laptop when I installed the printer. Had to connect the printer via USB and run the driver installation. Unfortunately, there isn't something like that for the Sensation.

To be honest moving files via BT is a pain. Why not plug in a USB cable and choose "disk drive", that way you can drag and drop in Explorer on the PC?

Because it's THERE! And it seems to be MOCKING ME! I can hear it laughing at me, Pete!

And if you want to sync things like photos, calendars, contacts, music, etc then choose HTCSync when you plug in, it is so much easier than the rigmarole you have to go though with BT.

I don't want my contacts synced from my laptop. One of the real complaints I have about this phone is the insanely intrusive manner in which it tries to link EVERYTHING together. My aunt's former boyfriend's cousin calls me ONE TIME it suddenly it's trying to link my Facebook and my phone accounts together. I stopped using this phone entirely for Twitter because I have multiple accounts, one private and one public, for entirely different reasons, and every damn time I post something it tries to link both accounts together. I didn't ASK it to, and I don't WANT it to, but there's no way to turn that intrusive bit of "helpful" off. (Much like the way the new Android Market "helpfully" lets you know that every GMail address on your phone has the same apps available for upgrade, resulting in three notifications for the SAME APP.)

I also just recently (like a day and a half ago) heard about HTC sync. I don't think it was on the memory card when I got the phone. This is the second card. The first one crashed and kept unmounting itself about two days after I bought the phone, so they gave me another one.

As I said before I do not think you are ever going to be able to print direct using BT. That is a limitation of Android, not the Sensation.

It still strikes me as odd that stuff I could do with a rather basic phone in 2007 can't be done with this miracle of electronics. I got the Samsung Blast because it was small and because it had a qwerty keyboard. It was my first texting phone. I worked in a Circuit City, and for fun I'd pair my phone to the various printers and print pictures from it to show customers what the printers could do. At one time my phone was paired to, like, eleven printers.

Fast forward to four years in the future, and a phone with more computing power than we used to land a man on the moon can SEE my printer but can't TALK to it. Iphones can do this, why not Android phones?

Of course, I'm also grouchy that the phone requires internet access to use voice recognition. It can't parse my speech well enough to find a contact IN MY CONTACTS LIST without a web connection... but my Motorola v710 could do it almost flawlessly in 2004.

It just seems like we're regressing.

Anyway, thanks for the help. I think I'm done with this silly bluetooth problem for now. The cable's faster and it seems like there really isn't much benefit. My dream of telling my "simply elegant" smartphone to sync my ebooks on its own doesn't seem to be coming true any time soon. Maybe there will be a firmware update sometime that will bring this phone in line with capabilities of a half decade ago.

I appreciate it, Pete. Thanks.

~D.
 
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