Tips on connecting a Nokia 7650 to a PC using TDK’s USB Bluetooth device

Install the PC Suite for Nokia 7650 software. This should open a dialogue that among other things lists applications you can send to your phone. Take a few minutes to review them, or be prepared to work out how to get the dialogue back later (don’t ask me). Just make a note of which ones you might be interested in. They are free. If you send them to your phone and decide you don’t want them, you can remove them using your phone’s Tools/Manager.

Once you have installed the TDK USB Bluetooth driver and the TDK device, you can pair your phone with your PC using the instructions in your 7650’s manual.

So far so good. Now there are some useful tools in PC Suite for Nokia 7650. But if you look in the TDK documentation, you will see lots of other interesting things. Don’t get excited, if you try to use them, they don't work. I queried this with TDK and received the answer ,"Unfortunately, the Nokia 7650 phone does not support AT Commands. Hence, TDK Mobile would not work on this particular phone model."

Now you have your phone and your PC paired, you need to get the two talking. This is a weird process. It is described on the TDK support site. This explains why you need to take some rather strange actions. It does not say which actions only need to be performed once. It does not point out pitfalls you can trip into, and does not exactly describe what happens (at least with my phone). So here is a summary of what you need to do.

You only need to perform these first actions once:

Open up explorer in the Bluetooth area. The quickest way to do this is to double click on the system tray icon, or right click on it and select explore. If the icon is not in your system tray, you can right click and use Explore on the Bluetooth icon on your desktop. You can also use the start menu, chose All Programs / TDK Systems / Bluetooth, right click on My Bluetooth Places and choose Explore.

Now when considering the pictures that follow, you need to bear in mind that I named my phone Steve Waring's phone. So browse to My Device (the folder with the PC icon), right click on Bluetooth Serial Port select Properties and make a note of the COM port that is being used. Here is a big tip. There are at least three serial ports listed under the Bluetooth location. You must always make sure you click on the right one. It is very easy to click on the wrong one.
Now right click on the system tray icon, chose properties, and tick the COM port you noted above.

Ok, here is where it gets weird; you need to do this every time you connect your phone to your PC:

Make sure your phone has Bluetooth turned on.
If you use TDK Power Switch to turn your Bluetooth USB device on and off, make sure it is enabled. The left hand LED should be lit or flashing.
Open up your phone’s directory in the Bluetooth places. Make sure you are in the correct place.
Double click on the serial port icon.
You should get a sequence of messages something like those shown below. Don’t worry about the error message, or the reference to COM0. The thing to notice is that the icon in the system tray changes to and then to
Ok, if you have managed that, you can reap the benefit.

Use the PC Suite for Nokia 7650 software to back your phone up before you do anything else.

Next you might like to copy all your Outlook details to your phone. The software allows you to keep your phone and outlook contact detail synchronised. Fine, but I use Outlook not Outlook Express, and I have a number of different contact folders. Also I don't want all entries within them in my phone. So I used the synchronisation feature to send all the details from each folder (one at a time, changing the folder details each time) and then went through my phone deleting the entries I did not want. I now have now created two temporary Outlook Contact directories that I use to transfer new entries between the phone and the PC and vice versa.

A word of warning here. I selected all details to be sent to my phone (you want those all important email addresses don’t you). It creates a load of empty entries in each entry, for example Business Fax, Home Country, etc. These don't show up when you display the entries, only when you edit them. They must be using up memory though.

Now might be the time to download those games you checked out when you installed PC Suite for Nokia 7650 software, use the software and select Tools/Install device software just browse through the CD to find the files to install. For example you might install . The install process tells you how much memory will be needed and how much you have free. You can delete the applications later using your phone’s Tools/Manager.

There are some awesome applications for the 7650 on the Web, and also some truly mundane ones. Try using “7650 application” in your favourite search engine. I have seen a Real One player, Mini global positioning, and a video recorder. Here are a couple that I suggest you check out. Don’t take this as a recommendation from me that these will not mess up your phone. They work fine on mine though:

Extended Profiles One of the features I liked about my old 3330 was that I could have a different screen saver for each profile. Thus I always knew what profile I had set. I was very disapointed to find that the 7650 only allowed one background to be set.
This application changes all that, and how. You can set the background image, colour scheme, screen saver, etc for each profile. You can also set up times when certain profiles should be active and the phone will switch to them. I have specified 9am Weekdays set the profile to Office, 5pm Weekdays set the profile to general.

Screen Saver This offers a number of screen savers, including a slide show of your images, playing an animated gif, the classic star field simulation, etc.

The Nokia 7650 has polyphonic ring tones. A search of the web will find plenty of sites offering them. There are good polyphonic ring tones out there offered for free. To install free ringtones on your phone, right click on the offering and use download. Once they are on your PC, rename them to what you would like them to be named on your phone. Then using explorer, drag them into the Public folder within the Bluetooth folder for your phone. You will get a message on your phone that you have been sent a file via Bluetooth. Open the message and you can play the ringtone. If you are happy use Options/Save. To rename or delete ringtones, open Extras/Recorder, highlight the ringtone you are interested in and use Options/Rename sound clip or Options/Delete.

You can also drop .txt files into the public folder. I can never remember what the keypad options are when connecting to my voicemail. I scraped them off Vodafone's WEB site, dropped them into notepad and put the file in the public folder. When saved, the file can be read via notes in the favorite folder. Now I just turn the loadspeaker on when I listen to my voicemail, and I can check the instructions at the same time.

The TDK install saves a program called Power Switch. This is very useful. Running it adds an icon to the system tray. This can be used to turn the Bluetooth device on and off. Right click on the icon in the system tray, then choose enable or disable as required. The left LED on the device is on (constant or flashing) when the device is enabled.

PC Suite for Nokia 7650 allows easy configuration of Access Points and Email box settings under the Settings Wizard. One thing I nearly missed was the next button when viewing phone details under View Settings on the Phone, this gives the option to save all the details to a txt file in a readable format.