I remember when BT was first announced it was supposed to change the way we interconnect our electronics. Nothing on your desk would be hooked together with cabling anymore (other than your monitor). It was supposed to be low power and reliable.
Flash forward 3-4 years and it hasn’t really taken off as expected. Sure it’s in cell phones, mainly for headsets, and Sony uses it for their controllers, but otherwise its really not that big. I think the cell phone BT headsets have questionable audio clarity at best too. I just expected to see it EVERYWHERE by now and I’m not, outside of cellphones.
So what is it that has kept this from being the “next big thing” like it was supposed to be?
I have a bluetooth headset that I use quite a bit with Ventrillo & Skype, for gaming and looooong business calls. Every time I hook the thing up, it’s a crapshoot as to whether or not it will really connect. About 60% of the time it works on the first try. The remaining 40% of the time, I have to do one or more of the following before it works:
re-pair it
pull the bluetooth usb dongle out from the computer and put it back
restart the bluetooth drivers on the computer
completely delete the headset profile from the bluetooth manager and recreate it
pray to the great BlueTooth Gods to please please please make my headset work before my important conference call
prick my finger and sacrifice some blood to the USB dongle. It seems to like that, making me believe it’s of demonic origin.
I also have a bluetooth scanner that I use with my Mac, which also has a bluetooth mouse & keyboard. Getting the scanner to connect is similar to the headset I describe above, even on the Mac, which is supposed to be so easy I should just have to think about scanning things and it should connect (right?) When I do manage to get the scanner to connect, it interferes with the mouse, which then becomes sluggish and unresponsive.
I like the idea of Bluetooth, but someone really has to make it better than this before it’ll really catch on. The average computer user does not want to screw around with loading drivers multiple times to get a peripheral to work.
Batteries, Batteries, Batteries, I don’t have to remember to recharge my corded earpiece that I only use in the car.
And where, o where, did I lose my Bluetooth? I thought I had it on when I went into the store, and now I don’t.
That’s the thing. I remember it being the “next big thing” for EVERYTHING that connected together, not just computers. It was going to be bluetooth speakers and all kinds of stuff. It just doesn’t seem like it ever really grabbed people.
I prefer the audio quality of a 9 dollar corded cell phone headset to the sound of my $50 Motorola BT headset.
A lot of people think you look like a big dork/geek with that thing in your ear. I hear that all the time. I am surprised I see women with those since I thought women certainly don’t want to look like a dork/geek.
I don’t have too much trouble connecting Bluetooth stuff to my computer. It’s very easy to do, but when I was shopping for a printer, I never found any Bluetooth printers in my price range. In fact, I don’t remember finding any Bluetooth printers at all. There was a time when a Bluetooth cellphone earpiece would have been nice, but I have no need of one now. I can connect my cellphone to my computer with ease, but I don’t know why I would. Maybe I could transfer a cool ringtone, but why do I need a cool ringtone? The pictures this thing takes are worthless. I’ve never had a cellphone that took any pictures worth anything. I’d love to know what cell pphones are being used to witness police brutality, because those pictures are ten times what my cellphone produces. Not that I need to take pictures with my cellphone anyway.
Also, why would I buy new equipment just for the convenience of Bluetooth when obviously I’ve been getting along without it. I think a lot of people would buy Bluetooth stuff if they had to buy all their equipment all over again, but the people that bought printers ten years ago allready have a fine printer. Hell, if I could get a good SCSI hook-up and ink (It is a hexachrome printer), I would never have bought a new printer in the first place. That printer was way better than the one I have now and it cost less.
I’d love to be able to sit right here and print something off in the other room. It’s just not available at a price I want to pay. My Bluetooth mouse is great, but I wish it had more than one button and a wheel.
I agree with the batteries statement, which is why I don’t own a wireless mouse (I’m sitting right there, wtf do I need it to be wireless for?) and it can, sometimes, be a royal pain to get things working.
The only thing I’ve ever actually used bluetooth for was with my old phone back in college. I had a program on my computer that would detect when my phone (or any bluetooth device, I’d imagine) was in range and it would active. So basically anytime I got home and walked into my room my computer would wake up and start playing music. THen when I left it would pause the music and go to sleep. That was sweet. Also it would pause whatever movie or music I was watching/listening to if I got a call (and it would display the name of the caller on screen). I should get that program again, it was pretty sweet…
In Japan, though, my phone doesn’t even have bluetooth. It never really took off here, you don’t even really see the bluetooth earpieces here, just the wired ones
Bluetooth driver sets are (so far as I know) still mostly generated & provided by the provider of the bluetooth dongle or chipset not the OS. These manufacturer provided connectivity applets are often multi-tabbed, non-intuitive frustrating messes requiring multiple attempts to get a good paring connection. Add to that the fact built in Windows OS support for bluetooth is spotty to non-existent.
Bluetooth is not a good technology being ignored it’s a good technology being extremely poorly implemented in many devices.
I’m a little confused about people saying the Bluetooth is hard to connect. Even the other Mac user had problems with her scanner. I have never had anything that I had to do more than tell it to connect. I turn my mouse on and the computer says “Bluetooth device available”. I have a little more fiddling with the phone, but essentially I just tell the phone to connect and tell the computer to loook for it.
That is certainly the way it should be. I just have no real reason to buy all new stuff for it.
Once you get it paired with your car’s audio system it is fantastic. Maybe that’s its niche. There are no battery concerns, you don’t look like a dork with a something hanging on your ear and it solves the whole hands-free driving problem.
There seems to be different versions of Bluetooth such that some will connect and some won’t. My wife’s Palm Treo won’t connect with her 2008 Toyota Rav4 audio system, although they both claim to have Bluetooth.
What others said for me - batteries, feel weird talking into thin air, extra cords, extra configurations to figure out…but for me, it was also the fact that I bought a cheap one and had TERRIBLE reception, even 2 feet from my phone. I just didn’t want to deal with it anymore, and figure I’ll take my chances with head cancer instead. You know it’s bad when that’s the alternative, and I take it
I agree bluetooths are very uncool. You hear people comment on it all the time. “What a jerk” or “Who the hell walks around like that.” And thank God for that, as those people scream into those things to be heard, so you can tell the quality must be awful
It’s probably worth noting that bluetooth is not just walking around with the thing in your ear. That is one device that uses a bluetooth connection, but there are plenty of others.
I also agree with the batteries comments. I managed, after some fiddling, to get my Palm Treo to connect to my laptop via bluetooth, but if I connect it via USB it charges the phone battery. That’s a lot more convenient than having a wireless connection.
I agree with this, although I’d say it’s the “user experience” that’s badly implemented (designed, actually), and not the bluetooth technology itself. The steps you have to go through on various devices to pair them are completely bizarre, and even if you understand the process, it’s hard to know exactly what to do. There’s always that moment where it says “enter the PIN” and I think, “ok, does this mean enter the PIN that the other device generated, or am I supposed to make up a PIN now and then I’ll enter on the other device too?” Because some devices do it one way and some do it the other, and you can never tell which you’re looking at because the UI is never explicit enough. And of course, this is the reason some devices just dispense with the PIN entirely and have a hardcoded PIN of 1111 or something.
All this adds to the general perception that bluetooth is kind of a pain in the ass, which affects its adoption rate for most things besides headsets, where pairing is a pretty one-sided (and thus simpler) operation (there’s no “UI” on the headset other than hitting a button to put it in the right mode).
