The “Break it Down” Blog

An article published today on Ars Technica, reports that the iBluetooth Project announced that they will soon be adding OBEX to the current set of Bluetooth profiles on the iPhone. In their 6th status update, they write:

We can now release which profile will be available first: (could I get a drum roll?)
-OBEX push object transfer!

For all of you OBEX file transfer is all you need to hear for the moment: push any object between anything be it music, applications photos, and more!
With OBEX file transfer, everything is one push away.

And for you coders out there, we are creating a fully fledged serial port API, that’s right – the option to pair with devices an start (multiple) serial port emulation!

What does this mean for the average iPhone user? Well if your iPhone is jailbroken, this means in the future you will be able to send files to/from other OBEX enabled devices (phones and computers).  While I don’t have an iPhone, my current phone does have the OBEX profile  and I couldn’t imagine not being able to get anything to/off my phone without using Bluetooth. Using the OBEX profile makes accessing my phone that much easier without having to deal with specialized cables to connect your phone to your computer. Sure iPhone users can sync their phones, but without OBEX they can’t send files to other Bluetooth enabled phones either.  This includes sending address vCards to users.
Here is a short video from these guys illustrating file transfer between an iPhone and a Mac as well as between an iPhone and a Sony Ericsson K550i.

I wonder how many people actually utilize the Bluetooth capabilities of their phones anyway? Here we have an iPhone that clearly has more potential that is being unlocked (pardon the pun) by folks like these all the time and I am left wondering…how many people really use these types of features on a regular basis? How many people are really aware of the potential of their devices for that matter? Well, I for one am somewhat aware, but for me this is good news because it’s not how often I would use something like OBEX…I just like knowing that I have that functionality if/when I do want to use it. It’s nice to see that hopefully soon, iPhone users will soon have a variety of new Bluetooth capabilities added to their phones.