Just a quick note to self : don’t waste any more time on Bluetooth.
Brief history:
2002: initial impression:
- Good name
- A bit like cables, only
- expensive
- brittle
- gives you tumours
- rubbish *NIX support
2003: on-call bluetooth phone and laptop.
- buy BT card for Zaurus so I can ssh in and reboot VBCs shit servers from the gutter outside the pub. Waste of time. Sadly turns out
- GPRS Bad. overly complex way to pay through the nose for 90s era bandwidth.
- BT Linux support pretty bad.
- (Open)Zaurus bluez support so bad I sell the little bastard because I am tired of fighting the urge to throw it against a wall.
- OBEX not that awful, strangely. Load ringtones without calling 0898 numbers. (Wait. OBEX is part of irDA, not BT. That explains it.)
2004-2005:
- Security issues (viruses, piss poor crypto) makes WEP seem merely dumb by comparison.
- bluetooth headsets make you look like a plum. With schizophrenia.
about 2 months ago – present :
- swathe of articles turn up on BT applications.
- Low power / PAN very attractive from a ‘teeny computer’ point of view
- get the spec out of the library
- start looking around ebay for ‘dongles’
But it’s
- pricey
- complex
- still stupid ( and the SIG seems oblivious to these issues – at least the 802.11 guys held their hands up to WEPs holes).
Think I was bewitched by BT as an interface to devices with no UI.
But if I have mains power, I am probably next to a PC. And I live in Wales.
USBnet is just a better ( e.g. securer, faster, less power, OS agnostic) connection than GPRS over bluetooth for 99% of uses. That might tie you to a keyboard/mouse interface, but most mobile/PDAs are as pleasant to use as a lump of hot lead smeared with dog poo (for my RSI blighted wrists anyway).
You know what? Screw bluetooth. If I want wirefree, 802.11 has worked fine for almost a decade..
We don’t need another solution in search of a problem. Its ‘killer apps’ are either irrelevant in the broadband age or never made sense in the first place.
Take the ‘laptop in the boot’ usage profile. Thieves now use this ‘feature’ to find, er, laptops in boots. And not to check their email.
The ‘fix’ is the usual bluetoooth fix- if you want to secure it, don’t use bluetooth. Thanks.
I hereby predict that soon you’ll be walking down a dark alley with a mate and behoodied ne’er-do-wells will emerge from the shadows. One will produce a phone and press a button.
Whichever of you beeps has the expensive phone.
Bagsy not me.