Debian Linux and Motorola V551

I had reported in previous months that I had trouble getting my Debian Linux machine to talk to a Motorola V551 over bluetooth. Finally, a newer bluez-utils (2.24-1) has hit Debian unstable, and now I've found that obexftp seems to work reliably. It'll keep the pairing and allow subsequent accesses, including listing and downloading files. I've not yet tested pushing anything to the phone or dialup networking, but it's a very welcome start.

Now I'll be able to regularly and conveniently download the camera phone pictures. Next I'll have to see if Claire will let me load some MIDlets on her phone. I'd like to try to find (or write) a few slick tools for her, then she'll keep believing that my playing can be useful. She's already admitted that Google Local Mobile is pretty cool.

Update (31 January 2006): I found out over the weekend that I can't push Java MIDlet jar files to Motorola phones (V551 or RAZR v3). I'm not sure why. I could push images and browse just fine.