Bluetooth Connection with Handheld and iPhone

Question

I am trying to establish a bluetooth connection between a Windows CE handheld device(A bank card reader) and iPhone. I want to make data transfer betweeen the two. I have read that prior to IOS 6.0 this was not possible. But with IOS 6.0 I can use core bluetooth to establish a connection.

I would like to know whether the handheld devices bluetooth should be of certain spec to make it work with IOS devices? Or are there any restriction fro any bluetooth device to communicate with an IOS device?

I have read here that the device should be Bluetooth LE. How can I detect whether my handheld device is bluetooth LE?

Thanks

Answer 1

It would be nice if you would provide more information about this Windows CE device.

Just search for the specs of it. If it supports Bluetooth 4.0 LE you have to look if it specifies any of the known profiles. If not the manufacturer may have implemented an own profile to provide certain services and characteristics.

If this is not the case, there is no possibility to establish a connection over CoreBluetooth. But if its a bank card reader I can't imagine, that it supports BLE.

If the device just supports Bluetooth 2.x you can only connect via the External Accessories Framework. But this only works if the manufacturer bought the MFi (Made for iPod) license and implemented the required specs into the hardware (only then the device is "MFi approved").