DeviceName and Discovery

DeviceName and discovery

Note, due to the way in which Bluetooth device discovery works, the existence and address of a device is known first, but a separate query has to be carried out to find whether the device also has a name. One can also see this in the Windows’ Bluetooth device dialogs where the device appears first with its address and the name is later updated. Bluetooth v2.1 supports extended discovery which supports sending the name in the first phase, both devices will need to support v2.1 for that to work.

This means that if a device is discovered afresh then the BluetoothDeviceInfo.DeviceName property might return only a text version of the device’s address and not its name. To see the name, wait for some time and access this property again having called BluetoothDeviceInfo.Refresh in the meantime.