I recently got my first bluetooth-enable cell phone (a Motorola v195 on T-Mobile). In addition to the bluetooth headset I'm eventually going to own I assume that eventually I'll make use of data connectivitiy of some sort.

I'm aware of bluetooth profiles, but what I've found on wikipeidia doesn't go much beyond defining them, without clarifying when you would need a specific profile or anohter.

I can see eventually making the following uses of bluetooth, sooner or later:

• a wireless cell phone headset
• connecting a BT-enabled PDA to the cell phone for data access
• connecting my laptop to the cell phone for GPRS web access (slow but not unusable)
• sync the PDA to the laptop over bluetooth
• connect a BT GPS receiver to the PC and/or the PDA
• ... ?

Assuming that there aren't any items on this list that are mutually exclusive, which BT profiles would I need to make sure I can support?

Headset profile for the headset (duh)
Handsfree profile for a carkit
Dial-up profile for data access with PDA and laptop
Serial port profile for syncing and GPS
Bluetooth object exchange (OBEX; for sending and receiving items like pictures)
Bluetooth OPP (for sending and receiving calendar and contact items)

These are the most common profiles and should be sufficient for most applications.

Other phones may support the following:

Bluetooth Audio profile (for streaming high quality audio to a stereo headset, also called AD2P)
Bluetooth Printing Profile (BPP; for printing images to a bluetooth enabled printer)
Bluetooth remote control, for letting a stereo headset control a musicplayer
Bluetooth basic imaging, for easy exchange of images made with the camera

Is this a distinct profile? I thought that most Bluetooth printing was done over SPP (serial port profile).

Do you know what the HP 460wbt requires?

There are several ways to connect to a BT printer; one is a "hard cable replacement profile" which in essence just replaces the printer cable with Bluetooth, the other is the basic printing profile. The major difference is that one needs the same drivers as on the PC (printer driver) while the other (BPP) has a printing protocol integrated meaning the PDA or phone can access any printer that supports BPP. I'm pretty sure that most HP printers support both, my photosmart will accept prints in BPP as well as with the regular printer driver connecting to it.

Thanks for the info. Does the TyTn have BPP? I've got a preproduction 8525 but the BT printers we have here do not expose a BPP.

Pffff... the TyTN has nothing Typical useless POS Microsoft Bluetooth stack. I get handsfree, serial, OBEX, A2DP and dialup. Don't even get file exchange, or anything else decent

Bluetooth on all HTC devices SUCKS, I wish they'd go with the Widcomm stack...

follow-up:

Now that I've learned what I need, where do I learn whatI have (on the V195 specifically)? I think you may have mentioned specific V195 capabilities in the first reply, but how do I determine this in general?

Let your pc discover the phone and do a search for available services.