Bluetooth Dongle Crap

Yesterday I mentioned that my new Bluetooth adapter was packaged in an odd case. Although I found the "deal" on bargain jack, the crap came from meritline. Other than selling the device, meritline did nothing wrong, the transaction was smooth,they did fast shipping and I'll definitely buy more crap from them in the future.

The actual bluetooth device isn't much bigger than a quarter but was in a case pretending to be much more.

Okay. I'm being tough on them by calling a a device crap that actually works. It does appear to work just fine with my cell phone and other bluetooth devices, I just had a problem using any stack other than Toshiba's to pair with a wiimote. That plastic stick masquerading as an antenna just gets me. Why would they do that? To get suckers like me to buy their crap.

The bluetooth chip is Cambridge Silicon Radio (CSR) but I can't quite make out the markings. As you can tell, my camera is not the best at taking close-ups. It appears to read BC212 015BD A21AA. I'm guessing that it's one of CSR's BlueCore3 ROMs. A quick Google leads to quite a few hits - I'll need to look into this in more detail.

Also talked yesterday about the BlueTunes app that lets me use a wiimote as a remote control for Media Player. Even though the crap adapter pairs with my cellphone all the way across the house, I've found that unless the wiimote stays about 10 feet from the adapter, BlueTunes reports a problem and puts up an error dialog every few seconds. When I noticed the problem, I had over 100 dialogs that I had to click OK. Cool app, dumb bug.