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Pairing smartphones to laptops or tablets
I replaced my iPhone a couple of weeks ago, the light sensor had failed and it no longer knew when you were talking on the phone and moved the phone away from your face to use the keyboard. Inconvenient, fortunately I had the extended warranty and the only hassle was driving to El Paso (and having a good Italian dinner and seeing Wolverine) and the time involved in re-syncing it.
One problem came up: we could no longer sync our laptops to my phone.
After the restore was done, the phone configuration was pretty much identical to what it was before, including the phone's WiFi/blue tooth hotspot name. I couldn't figure out why my wife couldn't sync, and started mentally troubleshooting. When you have weird network connectivity problems and you know the wiring is good and you don't think something has changed, you frequently start with flushing caches. In this case, I told my wife's laptop to forget my phone, then I reconnected it. At that point it was fine and had no problems pairing with it.
The issue is something that I wrote about recently: MAC addresses. Even though the name of the phone was the same as far as the laptop that I was trying to connect to it was concerned, the underlying MAC address was different. By telling the laptop to forget my phone, it cleared the cache that maintained that information. When I re-paired it, it saw a phone name that it thought it had never seen before along with a MAC address that it had never seen before, and dutifully added them back in to its cache when I supplied the correct password.
SO. If you ever buy a new smartphone or have to replace one and start having problems pairing your other devices to it, go in to your device's network settings and tell it to forget your original phone, that might be all that you need to do to take care of the problem.
One problem came up: we could no longer sync our laptops to my phone.
After the restore was done, the phone configuration was pretty much identical to what it was before, including the phone's WiFi/blue tooth hotspot name. I couldn't figure out why my wife couldn't sync, and started mentally troubleshooting. When you have weird network connectivity problems and you know the wiring is good and you don't think something has changed, you frequently start with flushing caches. In this case, I told my wife's laptop to forget my phone, then I reconnected it. At that point it was fine and had no problems pairing with it.
The issue is something that I wrote about recently: MAC addresses. Even though the name of the phone was the same as far as the laptop that I was trying to connect to it was concerned, the underlying MAC address was different. By telling the laptop to forget my phone, it cleared the cache that maintained that information. When I re-paired it, it saw a phone name that it thought it had never seen before along with a MAC address that it had never seen before, and dutifully added them back in to its cache when I supplied the correct password.
SO. If you ever buy a new smartphone or have to replace one and start having problems pairing your other devices to it, go in to your device's network settings and tell it to forget your original phone, that might be all that you need to do to take care of the problem.