[Duncan]

Originally Posted by Ed Hansberry

Wifi is as easy as it gets (assuming no encryption or just typing in a WEP/WPA key.) Plugging in an ethernet cable is as easy as it gets. IR Beaming is as easy as it gets. Bluetooth, OTOH, may require soft reset, enabling discovery mode, then remembering to disable them, and just general tecknological cantankerousness.

I like that - 'Wifi is as easy as it gets (assuming no encryption or just typing in a WEP/WPA key'. That's one hell of a qualification there. WiFi can be fantastically easy without security - but then you'd be pretty stupid not to secure your WiFi. The same applies to Bluetooth.

You can't have a radio based short distance communication technology without security. You can complain as much as you want about pairing, enabling and disabling discovery mode, but what's the alternative? Having an insecure connection?

You can't compare IR beaming (a close distance direct beam that is impossible to hack or access) or an Ethernet cable (the same) to a radio based connection. Those are no more reasonable comparisons than your security free WiFi is.

The truth is that Bluetooth connections are a lot easier than WiFi connections for people to set up. They are also about as easy to set up as they can be (set devices to discover mode, find them, enter pin, close discover mode). I'd challenge anyone to find a simpler method of enabling a secure short range wireless connection (save going backwards to IR). Any alternative to Bluetooth is going to have to do the same, or something similar.

Frankly - anyone not smart enough to be able to grasp setting up Bluetooth connections (especially when most devices hand-hold you through the process) shouldn't be trusted with technology. My wife, who looks at TV remote controls with something approaching a technophobic panic, was able to set up a Bluetooth connection between her phone, a headset and an in car speaker entirely by herself. That tells me all I need to know about the technology.

Seriously - in, what, eight or nine years of Bluetooth usage, only two devices have ever caused me problems. One was due to an early Microsoft stack and the other an asinine set up from Sony (who deliberately messed up the standard so it would only talk to Clies). I'm fairly sure that my Pocket PC ownership is in double figures now, I've had around seven headsets and two stereo headsets, my connection to my main stereo system is Bluetooth and my portable speakers are also Bluetooth enabled, I've not had to connect any device to my printer with a cable in five years and the idea of connecting my phone or Pocket PC to my PC by cable horrifies me. My PPC is beside me right now - and my laptop is in the room next door. ActiveSync between them just finished (having started automatically) about five minutes ago.

I know you guys think I am a luddite when it comes to bluetooth. That's fine. I can live with it. I just know that for me, and many I interact with, bluetooth is as friendly and as trouble free as those confounded customized modem INIT strings of yesteryear.

You're unusual I'll say that. I was in a train station the other day and it was hard to see anyone who wasn't Bluetoothed up. I've helped friends with almost every aspect of technology over the years, but have never been asked to help with Bluetooth (and I've recommended its use many a time) and have been thanked for pointing people towards the technology.

If you are a Luddite, then you are a curiously selective one. You'll forgive WiFi it's complexities (and I'll point to Jason's recent rant on 802.11n as an example of how user unfriendly that can be), but get annoyed at Bluetooth for taking you through the fewest and simplest possible steps to ensure a secure connection. You constantly hold out hope for other short range wireless technologies, but never seem to think about how they will ensure secure connections, or how they can be that different to Bluetooth. You've predicted the death of Bluetooth time and time again yet, for all its supposed user-unfriendliness, it's now so big as to be pretty much ubiquitous. I would bet too that if a piece of WiFi kit turned out to be poor you wouldn't blame the standard, you'd blame the implementation - yet with Bluetooth you always blame the standard and never the implementation of that standard.

Seriously Ed - I don't know how many thousands of anti-BT posts you're up to now, but Bluetooth won conclusively a while back. The technology is easy, widely used, and poor implementations are rare now. That Best Buy has found a way to fleece people by offering a service that no-one with a three figure IQ should need says far more about them and people's innate laziness (heaven forbid they should read the manual or follow on screen instructions for themselves) than it does about Bluetooth.