My wife finally upgraded her vintage (2001) Motorola StarTac phone. Her Nokia 6600 arrived in the mail today. Purchased at Amazon for $50 (with TMobile service), I was eager to see how easy it would be to transfer and sync items from the phone to/from our Mac. In typical Apple fashion, I can report, it just worked.

We have a D-Link DBT-120 bluetooth adapter on our Mac. My first test for the phone was to explore how easy, if at all possible, to send a contact from my address book to the phone. On the Nokia end, I took 20 seconds to select the “Connect” folder, choose “Bluetooth,” and enable its service. Then, playing the role of impatient end-user (not much acting required), I just opened Address book on my Mac, selected a contact, and “looked” for a way to get that contact to the phone. Sure enough, I immediately saw a “Send this Card…” menu command front and center. Selecting that command brought up a “bluetooth device discovery” window that in turn (well, after 1-click on “Search for devices”) quickly found the phone. One more mouse click (“send”) later, and the Mac quickly transfered the contact to the Nokia phone. On the phone’s end, I only had to select a “Save Business Card” option to add that contact to the phone’s contact list.

Total time: about 1 minute.

User manuals-help systems-tech support FAQs consulted: 0.

Score 1 for Apple and Nokia (well, the folks behind the Symbian OS anyway)

With that mountain conquered, I was off to testing iSync1.5. Apple’s site lists the Nokia6600 as a newly supported phone, but I’ve read how some people are having problems syncing their Address Book and iCal with this phone. I logged in to our Mac under my wife’s account and used Apple’s Bluetooth SetUp Assistant to pair the Mac and phone. Don’t know what “pair” means?.. that’s OK, neither did I really. The SetUp Assistant pretty much does all the work for you! With the pairing was successfully completed after a few clicks, I was off to iSync-land. After launching iSync1.5, I only had to select the “Add Device…” command (makes sense, doesn’t it?!) to enable iSync to automagically find the Nokia phone. I then used iSync’s device options to specify what I wanted sync’ed up (in my wife’s case, a subset of names from her address book, and all her iCal calendars), clicked on the “sync” button, and away it went. Less than a minute later, the Nokia was fully configured and sync’ed with the Mac’s address book and calendars.

Much as I hate to sound like an Apple zealot, I have to give credit where credit is due. Many have panned Bluetooth as too complex and decidedly not user-friendly. However, my experience was painless, brainless, and even a bit fun. Once again, Apple (and Nokia/Symbian) have shown how to make technology invisible, enabling the “rest of us” to simply do what we need to do.

Put another way: it just works.

I’d love to hear from others who think my Apple/Symbian kudos are misplaced or overblown. Do competing PC operating systems (oh, for argument’s sake, let’s choose one… ummm.. how ’bout Microsoft?!?) do as good a job making technology — and the Human-Computer Interface wrapped around it — as seamless and invisible as that described by my own Apple Bluetooth experience?

Did you like this? If so, please bookmark it, about it, and subscribe to the blog RSS feed.