Sync Your Pocket PC Wirelessly

Some users of Pocket PCs have reported difficulties getting ActiveSync to work over a Bluetooth link. This article provides an illustrated, step-by-step procedure to get it working quickly and easily. Our goal here is to achieve the Bluetooth Special Interest Group's goal of less than five minutes from out of the box to up and running. In addition, we hope to provide some understanding of why it all works the way it does. This article assumes that both your Pocket PC and your desktop PC are equipped with Bluetooth capability.

Setting up the COM port

The first step in getting this to work is to set up the virtual COM port to be associated with ActiveSync on the host PC. The virtual COM port allows Bluetooth to appear as a serial port on your PC, which in turn allows you to connect to the PC. Setting up ActiveSync to use the Bluetooth virtual port is actually the trickiest part of the whole thing. If you have any trouble, see the sidebar.

While methods vary slightly depending on the Bluetooth manager you have on your Windows Mobile device, the most common software is from Widcomm, so we use that in our examples. To set up the COM port, follow these steps:

1. Click on the Bluetooth icon in your desktop PC's system tray and then chose "View My Bluetooth services" (Fig. 1).
2. Select the Properties menu option and you will get the Bluetooth Properties dialog screen, which allows you to see the COM port assignment (Fig. 2). There are two important settings on this screen. First, by default, the serial port does not use encryption, but checking the box marked: "Secure Connection" will correct that. The second, and most important, is the COM port assignment. You need this information in order to set up ActiveSync. Also, if the port is assigned to a value greater than COM9, then you must use the drop-down menu to select a lower port number. If no lower number is available, see the sidebar.
3. Open ActiveSync on your desktop PC and select "Connection Settings" from the File menu (Fig. 3).
4. From the Connection Settings dialog screen, check the box marked "Allow serial cable or infrared connection to this COM port:" and select the COM port assigned to your Bluetooth device from the drop-down menu (Fig. 4).