Bluetooth PAN: A Nokia Ban

Speaking of my T-Mobile Dash, right now it’s a bit less useful than it was before, although I hope the regression is only temporary. Last week, I decided to upgrade my Nokia N800 Internet Tablet to the latest-and-greatest ‘Diablo’ O/S version. To date, O/S upgrades and patches on the N800 and its siblings are a bit of a pain, because:

• They require that I tether the Internet Tablet to a PC, i.e. they can’t be done ‘over the air’ in a self-contained fashion, and more importantly,
• They wipe the device clean, necessitating a subsequent re-install of all apps above and beyond those included with the O/S image (although if I run a backup beforehand, I ‘can’ restore browser bookmarks, contacts and other stored data).

That last bit was, in fact, my primary motivation for migrating to ‘Diablo’ (aka Maemo v4.1). As the official announcement indicates, ‘further OS updates will be made available over-the-air, without needing to reflash.’ We’ll see. Nonetheless, I took the plunge and afterwards, headed to Maemo to re-download all those cool open source community-created utilities I told you about three months back.

Most everything installed fine under ‘Diablo’ (though I need to give you an updated link to VNC Viewer for v0.6.1). But maemo-pan v0.6, which gets around the fact that the T-Mobile Dash’s version of the Windows Mobile O/S no longer includes the Bluetooth DUN (Dial-Up Networking) profile but instead offers Bluetooth PAN (Personal Area Networking), no longer functions. It seems to install fine, but Bluetooth PAN doesn’t subsequently appear in the N800’s list of available connections.

Nokia’s aware of the problem, and promises a patch. When it will appear is unclear; I suspect that if it takes too long, the maemo-pan developers will up-rev their utility to compensate. Until then, the brave among you can try a workaround that, among other shortcomings, requires that you gain root access to the O/S (something I try to avoid whenever possible with *nix-based systems, because very very bad things can happen if you’re not careful).