Both my partners at work have recently gotten iPhones.

I have been setting them up with our google calendar and contacts etc.

As I was working on porting contacts from the old phones to the iPhones. It became clear that the iPhone is unable to connect to another phone via bluetooth. A little reading indicates this is true for any bluetooth device with a file transfer option,

Seems like a hell of a limitation to place on the phone?

Anyway fixed with ease, I just connected their old (dumb) phones to my N900 pulled all the contacts into a vcf file onto my device then imported them into google contacts to sync with the iPhone.

But crippling bluetooth in this way seems a little OTT to me?

I thought the same thing when I tried to send a small mp3 file to a friend with an iPhone. Couldn't do it via bluetooth, so I just emailed it to him. Which worked fine. I wanted him to be able to use it as a ring tone. But iPhone doesn't allow you to save the attachment!! WTF?

There is a Looooooong list of devices that have the FTP profile disabled in their Bluetooth stack.

Many operators in the US do this to dumb phones to make sure that users have to use the carrier's overpriced options for ring tones and wallpapers. Other operators just do this to be jerks.

It's actives like this that lead most Americans to equate Bluetooth only to wireless headset functionality with no regards to the stacks otherwise innate ability to do FTP, DUN, Auto-sync, etc...

And really, at this point, is anyone really surprised when they find a standard smart phone/computer technology that has been arbitrarily removed by Daddy Jobs from the iPhone?

Ha that's exactly why, and a lot of other stuff that's wrong with it, I switched to N900 But I'm sure their's an app you can buy to do it...

Interesting.

This was truly the first time that I had come accross a phone that would not even recognize another device though.

All bluetooth phones I have used before have the ability to send contacts back and forth etc.

This one would not even recognize the device as existing. The LG would see the ipone and could pair but the iphone could not see the LG and when you tried to connect from the LG it failed.

That is a little more extreme then disabling a protocol.

sounds like the iphone was set to ignore certain types of devices.

basically, each device with a bluetooth radio have a class code set, either permanently or user changeable. The N800 for instance, id itself as part of the PDA class. My SE phone id itself as a phone. My linux running desktop computer on the other hand can have its class id changed, and so can be anything from a computer to a headset

sad thing is, there is really only one company that do bluetooth the "right" way, and thats sonyericsson (see my SE phone earlier), as i have seen odd behavior out of the box from both nokia and samsung phones in the past (tho that do not really say anything about later phones). But then again, the ericsson part of SE is the company that created bluetooth in the first place. So maybe they have a vested interest in getting it right.

Btw, ignoring other phones could be apples way of trying to remove the thread of bluetooth shared viruses, something thats hit both symbian and windows mobile phones in the past.

also, bluetooth is why i never really understood this drive to put a mobile phone radio into everything that can compute. Heck, i didnt know the US Telcos had a special word for attaching a phone to a computer by way of usb or bluetooth until i heard about people paying for special tethering plans. Where i live, norway, data traffic by phone just shows up on the bill, right next to call and text.

and its stuff like it that gets me worried when the tech press continually looks to USA for the latest and greatest tech, when next to japan, USA have what could be considered the most wacky mobile phone network operators in the world.

the iphone has a stripped bluetooth stack.

the only way thay can get a complete functionality is by jailbreak, and the install of a cydia app to replace the original stack while the app is running.

same happens for the usb connection. can be "pen drive" by the same way

but thats more for an iphone forum

So this all means that the Iphone is the reason for beeing unable to set up a bluetooth connection with the N900? And how is then that I cannot connect to Samsung devices either? Connecting to SonY Xperia phones does work by the way...

Make sure the Samung devices have the correct profiles for what your trying to do.

another reason why iPhone should not be categorized as a "SmartPhone".