Cross Platform Bluetooth Compatibility

Question

I have a requirement to have a cross-platform program designed for mobile devices such as Android, Brew, Bada, WinCE, etc. - be able to communicate with other instances of yourself via Bluetooth.

Unfortunately:

• The Bluetooth APIs on these devices are radically different.

• the terminology they use is also radically different.

• what actually works is often radically different from what they say.

So far, I have found that Android will allow you to connect or listen to the RFCOMM services specified by a simple UUID, but it does not complicate the manipulation of SDP records anymore; Brew claims to support SPP, but the API seems to allow arbitrary RFCOMMs; Bada supports SPP, but does not allow you to specify a UUID, so I have no idea how you should perform a service discovery or listen to two things at once ...

Oh, and iOS doesn't allow you to transmit Bluetooth at all with non-iOS devices.

So:

I cannot be the first to do this. Is there a well-known subset of Bluetooth features that I should use to maximize portability?

Answer 1

Device manufacturers usually implement some bluetooth profiles such as A2DP, OBEX, etc. Depending on what you want to do, you have to make sure that all target devices implement the required profiles.

Please note that even if the device can implement a specific profile, there may not be an API that allows you to use it.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluetooth_profile .