iPhone 5 Portable Genius

Pairing Your iPhone to Bluetooth Devices

Your iPhone is configured to use a wireless technology called Bluetooth, which enables you to make wireless connections to other Bluetooth-friendly devices. Most Macs come with Bluetooth built in, and they use it to connect to a wide range of devices, including mice, keyboards, cell phones, printers, digital cameras, and even other Macs. Your iPhone can, at the very least, connect to a Bluetooth headset on which you can listen to phone conversations, music, and movies without wires and without disturbing your neighbors.

In theory, connecting Bluetooth devices should be criminally easy: you bring them within 33 feet of each other (the maximum Bluetooth range), and they connect without further ado. In practice, however, there’s usually at least a bit of further ado (and sometimes plenty of it). This usually takes one or both of the following forms:

Making the devices discoverable. Unlike Wi-Fi devices that broadcast their signals constantly, most Bluetooth devices only broadcast their availability — that is, they make themselves discoverable — when you say so. This makes sense in many cases because you usually only want to connect a Bluetooth component such as a headset with a single device. By controlling when the device is discoverable, you ensure that it works only with the device you want it to.

Pairing the iPhone and the device. As a ...