where's my tooth?

I recently bought over iJun's less than 1-year old Nokia 6230i to replace my working-but-getting-cranky Nokia 8250 (nicknamed the Butterfly phone with the first blue screen). It has pretty nifty functions - 1.3megapixel camera, bluetooth, IR, radio, oh all those things that they've built inside but I probably wouldn't use 80% of the time.

Eager to do some file transfers like photos and cute wallpapers to my "new" phone (oh yea, and do some data backup too), I picked up a USB Bluetooth dongle from Mid Valley Megamall yesterday. Being the cheapskate that I am (sometimes), I settled for a RM50, "Tiny Tech" branded dongle that looked like it could do the job. Made in China. Then again, everything's made in China these days. After all, it's just an additional antenna that connects all the other devices, right?

Wrong.

Took me a couple of hours installing the driver from the little CD that came with the dongle. It kept prompting that the software wasn't Windows XP security something or other approved, and I kept clicking "Install Anyway". Oh, get on with it now!

Finally after all that clicking and rebooting, I tried connecting to my phone. Uik? Hmmmm... Sometimes the dongle could detect the phone, sometimes it couldn't. And when it did, it couldn't quite connect to my ring-ring. Even after pairing. Even after typing in a passkey. Even after checking and re-checking all the configuration on both the phone, the Nokia PC Suite, and re-installing the supposedly BlueSoleil application for the Bluetooth dongle (the dongle's not a BlueSoleil product, though).

Aaarrgghh!

Ok, ok... maybe it's my phone. I tried to connect to my colleague Julie's SonyEricsson phone to see if the dongle would work with hers instead. *click click click*... Still can't! Phone to phone, yes. Phone to my PDA, yes. PDA to my phone, yes. Anything to my PC / dongle... No.

SIGH!

Serves me right for picking up a lauyah no-name dongle. I think I'll pop by the shop again and see if I could exchange it for a so-called better one tomorrow evening after work. Would've done the exchange today but I didn't bring the receipt with me... duh. Pray that they'll be kind enough to allow the exchange, otherwise, there goes RM50 down the drain. I'll definitely pick up a so-called better one next time, like Belkin (a whopping RM199!) or Billionton (checking price on Low Yat's site... RM50 for the 100M dongle! Same price as this no-name dongle! I feel so cheated...). Any other recommendations? Bright ideas? Help me troubleshoot?

I could almost hear my Tech Admin say...
"It's not a PC / device problem, it's a user problem..."

Gee, thanks.

*grumble grumble*


Technorati: ramblings, gadgets