Lately I've enjoyed listening to DotNetRocks and HanselMinutes during my commutes to/from the client. I was using the cheap headphones that come with the SP5 which work pretty well in that taking a call while listening to a show is pretty seamless. However, being a gadget guy I thought I would like to upgrade to some better headphones.
Round One - My wife bought me a the HS850 handsfree device from Best Buy. I set it up and start my drive to work. I put the headset on and hit play on the phone. Strangely the audio comes out of the phone's speaker instead of the headset. With a little google research I figure out that I will need stereo headphones to play windows media to the hands-free headphones. The HS850 goes back and I order the HT820 stereo headphones.
Round Two - The new headphones come in and while the hands free part of the headphones work just fine with my SP5, the stereo part does not. A little more google research and I figure out that the phone would need to support A2DP which is part of the AKU2 update. I already have applied that update from i-mate so I put in some support requests and post questions to their support forums: no response. I give i-mate a 1 of 10 for their support on this. As far as I can tell, the A2DP support was pulled from the SP5 AKU2 update, maybe in the next update.
Round Three - Ok fine, my perfect scenario won't work, maybe I can salvage the situation a little by using the headphones with my Toshiba M2 laptop since it has bluetooth. Well I'll skip all the work it took to get a Toshiba bluetooth stack with A2DP, but eventually I found the download (hint: it is the one for the m5 (v4)). Everything seems to be great until I try to connect to the headphones and get the screenshot above. WTF is SCMS-T?!?! Thankfully I was able to google up a solution from here to here to finally here which contains a link to this file. Run the file and it turns off the SCMS-T requirement. Sweeet! Now I'm listening to music and when a call comes in on my phone I can answer it while the music pauses. Fast forward, skip tracks, etc. It all works great, as long as I run that program everytime I reboot my laptop. :(
Why is this so difficult? At this point I'm ready to buy an MP3 player to use as my music source and just deal with having multiple devices. But I can't seem to find a player that supports A2DP over bluetooth. Imate: update your software! Toshiba: WTF is SCMS-T? Motorola: I love the headsets!
Update: [via SmartPhoneThoughts]:
"The guys over at xda-developers.com did it again and found a way to enable A2DP on Windows Mobile AKU 2 updated devices, even if your operator left out the A2DP and AVRC Bluetooth stereo profile out!"
Amazing! Downloading now....
Update2: It works! I can now use my HT820 headphones with my sp5. The interface has a few bugs (like windows media doesn't automatically restart when I'm done with a call), but hey it works. If you're looking to get this working go here and/or here. I had to turn off bluetooth, then power down and back up to get it working on my phone.