3. Test One: Using A Nokia 6600 Smartphone

We used a two year old Nokia 6600 smartphone. It is based on the Symbian Series 60 OS, which has been in use on various smartphones for about two years. Other models from Nokia using this OS are the 6630, 6670 or the 6680, but they are more popular in Europe and Asia then they are in the USA.

Our first attempt to have the Nokia smartphone detect the keyboard failed. Though it was detected as a new Bluetooth device, we were not able to use it. The reason was a driver that you must install beforehand from the installation CD.

Unfortunately, a driver has to be installed for every device you want to use with the Bluetooth keyboard. This leaves the user heavily dependent on driver support provided by the keyboard's manufacturer. Strangely the German Pearl Agency provides neither Windows nor MacOS drivers. These drivers are available if you purchase the product from ThinkOutside.

Another problem we encountered had to do with the installation program. It did not like our Bluetooth USB stick and aborted the installation process. So we had to copy the driver file manually to the Nokia 6600 smartphone. While this is not very difficult to do if you're familiar with copying files to your smartphone, beginners might not be able to figure out how to get a file onto their mobile unit and will thus miss out on using this neat input device.