[frankthomas]

I read a few forum threads about the problems people were having with using bluetooth to tether to the storm as a modem, and also read threads with people have trouble getting their desktop manager to see the storm once it is connected with bluetooth.

I bought a Targus USB dongle from Office Max, I guess that is what you call the little gizmo that plugs into the laptop. Installed the drivers and software that came with it. Ran the bluetooth setup on my Storm, then ran the add a bluetooth device from the bluetooth device tray icon on the laptop. To start tether, I select quick connect - dialup networking from the bluetooth tray icon, that in turn brings up the dialup connection where I enter {phone number}@vzw3g.com, vzw as password, and #777, and it connects very fast. The actual connection tray icon says connected as 112 kbs, but I ran a few speedtest tests and was getting 750 kbs down and about 170 kbs up. It certainly is alot more convenient than hooking the USB cable up.

But then I wanted to be able to explore the files on the media card and be able to transfer files back and forth from the storm to the laptop using bluetooth. THere is a connection tab in the laptop tray icon software that allows me to do file transfer, but I had all kinds of trouble with it, somewhere in the process the software tells me that my phone does not support file transfer with bluetooth.

Naturally I did not believe that, so I tried using the Desktop manager, but it would not connect to the phone using blue tooth. Then I tried to correct it by going into the blackberry device manager, and found my option to turn on bluetooth support was greyed out.

So I did a search on these forums and elsewhere and basically discovered that the problem has to do with the targus dongle driver not being a pre installed windows driver. One solution I read said go get a another dongle with the windows built in support and use that.

Not happy with that solution, I did some more searching and found a fellow who claims he has a workaround for it. An interesting read which requires doing some surgery on the bluetooth inf file and removing the software that comes with the dongle:

I am unable to post the link as a link, so it here it is in parts

supportforums.blackberry.com/t5/BlackBerry-Desktop-Software/Bluetooth-support-greyed-out-when-using-built-in-bluetooth-on/td-p/

34531/page/2;jsessionid=F83BB422CEBB8A4ED0E23694FE3A50A0]Bluetooth support greyed out

when using built-in b... - BlackBerry Support Community Forums

I started to do this but chickened out. The main thing I want the blue tooth to do is allow my tether without the wires. The file transfer is nice but not essential. I would not be happy if after doing this I could access the phone files with the desktop manager but could not use it as a modem.

If anyone else has tried this, would be interested to hear how it worked out for you.