Nov
07
2003Minor D-Link update
07
2003
A “real” employee from D-Link called me up last night. He provided an accurate description of exactly what the situation was, but really couldn’t offer any solution to the situation (which, as I explained at the very end of my last post, I didn’t even really need).
What D-Link is doing with the DBT-120 and Apple makes perfect sense, in a way. Mac OS X has a built-in Bluetooth stack, and Windows does not. Therefore, D-Link provides two packaged products - an adapter WITH Bluetooth stack software (licensed from WIDCOMM), and an adapter WITHOUT software included (what Apple sells). And the kicker is that the software is “tied” to the MAC address of the device. Therefore, an Apple-sold DBT-120 will NEVER work with the WIDCOMM software.
The irony here is that the version sold by Apple actually costs about $10 more than the “standard” DBT-120 WITH the WIDCOMM software - but hey, that’s Apple for you…
Anyway, I have no real problem with this sort of product line-up, except (for the gazillionth time), they should NOT be selling two different product offerings with the same model number!
Incidentally, the DBT-120 works great on my iBook, though I did manage to lock-up the system somehow when I first tried to “pair” the devices…
I now have a BELKIN Bluetooth adapter on the way for my PC. I’m really anxious to use the well-designed PC-based image editor/uploader Sony Ericsson bundles with the T610. You can upload images from the Mac, but you have to manually resize/crop them in another program first. That’s no fun.
Update (11/10/04): See the update to the previous post.