There's always been a lot of yakking about Bluetooth, the short-range wireless networking technology built into the very laptop computer I'm using; into millions of cell phones, PDAs and other info-gadgets but you know what? I've never known anyone — myself included — to actually transfer any data over a Bluetooth network! So I wasn't much surprised to read that Swedish phone giant, Ericsson — which helped invent Bluetooth — is shutting down the unit that was developing Bluetooth.
I'm sure someone somewhere was using Bluetooth and, lord knows, every Macintosh tip, and trick book I pick up talks about endless hacks you can do with your Bluetooth-enabled Mac. I'd always thought I was missing something but maybe I'm not. Do you use Bluetooth? Why? What for? Could you get by without it?
Yeah, absolutely.
I have a bluetooth equipped phone and I leave the bluetooth on all the time these days.
I mostly use it to connect my laptop to the Net (a bluetooth modem, in essence) when a wireless node or ethernet drop isn't handy.
I also use it to load my contact list into the phone without lots of tedious text entry on the phone keypad.
I also use it to grab the photos off the phone.
So at the moment I use bluetooth solely to communicate between my phone and my laptop. But I would happily welcome more bluetooth devices.
The irony for me came when I went to Motorola's site. I have always preferred Motorola's cell phones and I wanted one with bluetooth. They made a big deal about how exciting and wonderful bluetooth is, but then when you looked through their list of phones, almost none of them were bluetooth enabled.
If bluetooth disappears from cell phones it will leave a big hole in how I use my phone and computer.
I'm an extremely tech savvy guy if I may say so myself and I've never ever had a use for Bluetooth. Thats not to say it isn't useful but there isn't a single person I know that has ever been excited by (or bothered to use) Bluetooth.
Bluetooth is dying because there are so many driver issues.
Part of the glorious vision of Bluetooth involved being able to walk into a room with a laptop or PDA and instantly connect with any other device (e.g. printer, scanner, camera, etc.).
The reality of Bluetooth is more like this: “Windows has detected new hardware. Would you like to add this device?” followed by “Whoops, you don't have the driver CD-ROM with you, do you?”
Bluetooth does better among Mac users because there are fewer driver issues.
I had the use of a Sony Ericsson phone for a couple of weeks and loved the convenience of syncing the contact list from my Mac to the phone. It gave me one less address book to update, and one less cable to carry.
So far, I haven't found any “essential” uses for Bluetooth. It's essentially a wireless cable replacement that costs more than the cables it replaces. That's a pretty hard sell.