Problem
With the Bluetooth drivers provided by Dell for the Dell Wireless 1820A Bluetooth 4.1 LE, Apple Airpods Pro can be connected successfully, but sound playback is not possible. While connected as an audio device sound just plays over the laptop speakers and the device does not show up in the Sound Control Panel.
Solution
Download a feature complete driver from Lenovo...
Driver can be found here: https://support.lenovo.com/nl/en/downloads/DS104776
This works when your Bluetooth is provided by the: Dell Wireless 1820A Bluetooth 4.1 LE because the driver package that Lenovo provides supports many Broadcom based Bluetooth modules. I was able to find out from the driver bcbtums-win8x64-brcm.inf file for Broadcom devices that multiple Dell modules are supported.
Long story short:
- Download the driver package
- Run the Windows executable, this will unzip the driver package to a location of your choosing
- Go to the chosen folder and run Install.exe, this will start the installation process
- If your Bluetooth module/chip is supported by this package it will install the driver for you, if not it will abort the installation (can't help you with that)
- After a successful installation reboot your laptop
- Pair your Apple Airpods Pro and now you will have fully functional Airpods on your Dell laptop thanks to Lenovo
Hope this helps someone out, it was quite the adventure to find this fix but at least now I can use these earbuds on this laptop.
Here is the full list of Dell Bluetooth modules that are potentially supported by this driver installer.
