Saturday, March 14, 2009

Bluetooth file transfer from iphone: iBluetooth

One of the biggest things that I hate about iphone is its inability to transfer files to other devices over bluetooth. See my earlier post expression my anguish. I feel that this is a serious limitation given the fact that this is a basic functionality. By default, iphone bluetooth capability is only limited to the headset. i.e You can take calls on a bluetooth headset. There is some more stupidity in this. Even though iphone supports bluetooth headset, you cannot listen to the songs or video using the headset. Nonsense !! Anyway, lets get back to the topic of this post.

Few days back an application called 'iBluetooth' is released via the cyida installer for jailbroken phones. The provides the functionality to transfer files over bluetooth to any other bluetooth enabled device like another mobile or PC. It has an in-built file browser which will allow you to browse through the OS filesystem. Moreover, it has a image viewer also which can be used to browse the photo folder. i.e You can visually browse the pictures taken with your camera, and send them over bluetooth. However, I found that the pictures sent in this method are having less resolution than the actual images. It seems this method sends only the thumbnails and not the actual images. Actual images are located in the folder "/private/var/mobile/Media/DCIM". Here you can get the full resolution images taken with the iphone camera. I cannot give technical details like data transfer speed and all but the performance is quite good according to my experience.

There is one catch though. This is a paid app and charges $3.99. I feel its totally worth it as gives a jump to the iphones functionality. In the future there are plans to support the itunes music library also. So, instead of hunting down the OS filesystem, there should be and easy access. The developer behind this awesome utility is MeDevil. In his blog he explains why he is charging money for the application. He has plans to buy a commercial ready-made full bluetooth stack implemented for generic devices and its quite expensive. Once he gets a hand on that he want to put that into a daemon and provide much more functionality using this software. So, we can expect things like ablity to send contacts, bluetooth serial port etc.

Enjoy bluetooth on iphone.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Cool blog as for me. I'd like to read a bit more concerning this matter. The only thing it would also be great to see here is a few photos of some devices.
Katherine Kripke
Cell phone blocker