Kinivo BTD-300 Bluetooth 3.0 USB adapter

At first I was disappointed and frustrated trying to get this to work. The software installation went over without a hitch and I could see the Bluetooth symbol in my services tray, but I couldn't get it to recognize my Bluetooth devices or pair with them. After looking around online, I discovered that with many versions of Windows 7 64 bit, you have to enable Bluetooth service and support.

This is done by clicking on the Start orb on bottom left, and typing in "services". Scroll down to Bluetooth services, right click and set to automatic. Do the same for Bluetooth support (mine was disabled, hence my difficulty). Then reboot your computer. After I did this my computer recognized my devices right away and I had no more problems.

I was not sure whether this was going to be a good product, when I ordered it there were no reviews, but I was pleasantly surprised. I have a built in Bluetooth adapter on my computer, but the first time I tried to use it was a week ago with a Bluetooth headphone set. The headset was of the same brand, Kinivo, and when I paired it and tried to use it I found I had a range of only a couple of feet, and only when my head was turned to the right. needless to say I was very disappointed, ready to send back this headset I decided to try one more thing, I paired it with my phone and turned on some music, immediately I realized that my range had increased exponentially. I could now walk through out my entire house and still get perfect signal. So i decided if the headset was of good quality then Kinivo must make a decent product, so I ordered this Bluetooth adapter and was not disappointed. The range is as good as pairing it with my phone, I can walk anywhere within my house and still get a perfect signal.

PROS!!!!

Best Price for One of the few Bluetooth 3.0 adapters

Good range, atleast 30ft with my headphones

Easy installation less than 10min, comes with installation disks (mini CD's)

Backwards compatible with Bluetooth 2.0, and 2.1

CONS!!!

I will post an update if I find one

All in all, I will not be afraid to purchase a Kinivo product in the future, very positive experience.

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Works well in Linux (Ubuntu). I paired it on kernel 3.2.7, older ones probably work, Ubuntu 11.10. Used a Apple Trackpad and BT Keyboard.

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: 3:25 Mins

I purchased this to replace an AZIO bluetooth dongle that had a loose cap and bluetooth was dropping out unexpectedly.

The package for the BTD-300 includes 2 mini-CD's containing drivers for XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7. Since I have recently upgraded to Windows 8, I was a little frustrated initially since inserting the dongle into my PC laptop did not result in the correct driver being installed. I had to go to the Kinivo website to find and download the appropriate Windows 8 driver. After doing so, the USB bluetooth dongle worked perfectly and I was able to pair with my bluetooth speaker easily.

Out of curiosity I also installed the dongle on my mid-2012 MacBook Pro, just to see what would happen. I already have bluetooth by default in my MBP but by turning bluetooth off first, then plugging in the dongle then turning bluetooth back on from the menubar, I was able to connect to previously paired devices as well as add a new device. So it worked well and did not require any driver installation whatsoever.

The BTD-300 seems to go into power-saving mode when not in use since the blue LED light that is on during periods of activity will go off completely when there is no bluetooth device connected.

The dongle is tiny. It does not stick out very far from the USB port and it does not prevent using any immediately adjacent USB ports either due to being wide... it isn't wide and is barely wider than the USB port itself. Since it is so small, I just leave it plugged in 99% of the time.

So far it seems to provide reliable bluetooth connectivity. I've not had any issues other than the Windows 8 driver installation not happening automatically. You can't really beat the price and the 2-year warranty is reassuring, This is a great and inexpensive solution for adding bluetooth capability to a laptop that does not already have bluetooth or may have a broken or otherwise inoperative bluetooth capability.

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Amidst other reviews saying the driver disk was horrid and kind of confusing, I plugged it into a win7 x64 system and 2 seconds later had my wiimote working in win7. Flopped over to a linux install to test it there, and nothing needed but to pair the device.

If you need something cheap that works well, this is your guy.

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Kinivo BTD-400 Bluetooth 4.0 USB adapter

I didn't have too much trouble installing the device drivers on a windows 7 64bit. I inserted the disk into the dvd drive, then clicked start, right clicked computer, clicked properties from the menu that pops up, clicked device manager, then you right click on the bluetooth device, click properties, click update driver, and then you tell it to look for drivers on your computer, select computer from the menu, and then find your dvd drive and tell it to look for drivers there. Alternatively, you could also follow the instructions it came with, but those seemed a little messed up, or formulated for another version of windows.

Overall it works pretty good. I was able to successfully pair this with an Asus Infinity tablet, and sent files back and forth between the tablet and the computer just fine, However, I also tried pairing this with a Motorola droid 2 and I was successfully able to send files from the computer to the phone, but not from the phone to the computer. I have tried updating the drivers, but it still doesn't work, although I do want to try playing with it a bit more.

My only other complaint is that I did drop this about a foot or so onto my desk and the little plastic piece on the back broke at the seam. This didn't interfere with the functionality, but it is an annoyance and points to somewhat cheap manufacturing. I could try sending it back as it does have a two year warranty, but I plan on keeping this plugged into my desktop and I have no real need to send it back.

I have not used this to stream music, so I cannot comment on that.

Overall, a good product, but you may want to look at something else if you plan on using this with multiple computers.

Update:

I was contacted by Kinivo and they are sending me a replacement free of charge. I have raised my rating from 3 to 4 stars because of their excellent customer service.

Added this device to my ASUS UL30 and it worked instantly. It would be nice if it could be smaller, but I don't think that is an option... also, enough with blue LEDs on everything, some of us are trying to sleep.

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The bluetooth adapter is mall and the blue light is not too intrusive. It was detected automatically by Windows7. However I chose to download the latest bluetooth driver package from Broadcom (). This allowed a little more features/flexibility for my bluetooth headphone/headset/mic. I haven't tried this on my Linux systems and update once tested.

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Works fantastically. No issues whatsoever. It says only compatible with Windows, but it works seamlessly with Linux Ubuntu 12.04. Great.

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First, the adapter itself: no problems, installed quickly on a Win7 laptop, paired easily with stuff. But after a day or two, the device stopped responding at all.

The company had really amazing customer service. I sent an email describing the problem on a Wednesday around 3pm. I got an email response a little more than an hour later, asking for the Amazon order ID and my address. I sent it to them, and got an acknowledgement Wednesday night around 11pm. By Friday afternoon, a replacement adapter was waiting at my front door! Really, this is about the best customer service I've ever received from a company. (And of course the second adapter has been working fine ever since.)

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