[cflogan]

I just bought a GlobalSat BT-359 GPS Puck to compliment my new 8830 (Verizon), and while I've had decent luck with the BBMaps, the other two applications I have that are supposedly GPS aware (GoogleMaps and 411Berry) cannot seem to initiate their own connection to the Bluetooth device.

The pairing to the device was straightforward and the only thing I changed from the default settings on the connection was to make the connection Unencrypted. There is no option to "Connect..." to the GPS unit from the BB's BlueTooth options, however (I was expecting to be able to force a connection on in the same way you can force a headset to connect after initial pairing is complete).

Anyway, with BBMaps, this doesn't seem to be an issue. 4 out of 5 times, the application seems to trigger the Bluetooth connection itself (and oddly only as necessary). If I choose "Find My Location", the BB connects to the Puck for ~ 3 seconds, the map updates, and the Puck disconnects (no double blue arrows next to the BlueTooth icon in the titlebar). If I choose "Start GPS", the BB connection to the Puck stays on and the GPS functionality seems to work OK until I choose to stop it (except when driving through a dead zone in Verizon's coverage).

However... here is my problem: Neither GoogleMaps nor 411Berry seem to be able to 'trigger' the BB to connect to the Puck. They either timeout trying to find a location, or often with GoogleMaps, they actually hang the BB and I have to reboot the BB. I'm using GoogleMaps v1.5.4; the most recent version.

The catch here is that if I launch the GPS functionality from within BBMaps, then escape out to the desktop and use either GoogleMaps or 411Berry, they will work perfectly fine! The GPS feature in BBMaps seems to be necessary to keep the connection to the Puck alive so that the other applications can access the GPS locations. This is a pretty crappy work around and I would certainly hope that the issue would not exist with the onboard GPS ($%^&* Verizon for disabling it).

I've seen two postings here that seem to be similar problems but no good solutions:

http://www.blackberryforums.com/gene...reetpilot.html

http://www.blackberryforums.com/gps-...s-problem.html

Has anyone else observed this weird behavior with their pucks and an 8830 (or other) BB? Is it my puck that can't keep the connection alive, or the BB, or the software?

Thank you in advance for any help or suggestions... or even confirmations that I'm not the only one.