Pocket PC Phone Edition users: Change the Microsoft Bluetooth stack to the Widcomm one!

You may have heard (particularly if you’ve been following my past articles) about the differences between the Microsoft Bluetooth stack coming with HTC Phone Edition devices and know its major shortcomings when compared to the major alternative, the Widcomm / Broadcom BT stack:

1. It lacks BT PAN (albeit the latest AKU3 has some basic support for BT PAN server functionality) support, which would be of high importance in, say, chatting / talking apps (for example, 4Talk or Microsoft Portrait or multiplayer games)
2. It, as far as versions prior to AKU3 are concerned, lacks support for BT FTP (see THIS ARTICLE for more info)
3. It has wildly inferior A2DP (stereo Bluetooth headphones) sound quality

No wonder a lot of people have been actively trying to “hack†the Widcomm BT stack on Pocket PC models initially coming with the Microsoft BT stack. Of them, the WM5-upgraded Dell Axim x50(v) and the x51(v) may already be known to you (I’ve also posted a lot on the project; see for example THIS).

Some weeks ago, well-known XDA-Developers hackers started to work on the port to HTC Phone Edition phones; for the most part, with success.

For the most part, you may ask? Yes, unfortunately, there still are problems; they are as follows:

1. Currently, it’s not possible to use traditional Bluetooth headsets for calling. Upon trying to connect to the headset, the PDA will just display an error message as can be seen in HERE. In the Hermes Widcomm developer thread, people are working on fixing this issue; so far, with little success. This will be a showstopper for many.
2. You won’t be able to use the PDA as a modem via Bluetooth (see my tutorial here) using either pre-AKU3 DUN or AKU3 Internet Sharing BT PAN. Also see this thread for my posts on this problem.

That is, if the lacking functionality is a showstopper for you, do NOT consider switching BT stacks as yet.

Model-specific tutorials / threads

Check them out for a discussion and / or a tutorial for installing the BT stack on your particular phone model:

HTC Wizard

HTC TyTN (Hermes) (my earlier report)

HTC Trinity: it seems it still doesn’t work at all (I’ve tried hacking very hard).

HTC Universal(old thread here).