David Berlind of Cnet.com demonstrates to Bluetooth promoters standard lacks interop, explicability: In what has to be the second largest publicly documented embarassment to the Bluetooth SIG, Berlind had three Bluetooth promoters come to his home office and watch connection after connection fail.
He writes, the SIG representatives revealed that consortiums like Bluetooth SIG are relatively powerless when it comes to cleaning up messes like this one. Actually, only because the Bluetooth SIG allowed the name Bluetooth to be put on devices without a lab interop/certification program like Wi-Fi.
Reading that article, and the associated comments, it seemed clear to me that a lot of the problems are with Bluetooth _on Windows_ (I include CE here.) Personally, I have a lot of BT kit (T68i, Tungsten, HBH60, Powerbooks), and actually my experience had been pretty painless. Everything just worked. That is until I tried it on Windows - the experience was absolutely terrible. I blogged about this a couple of weeks ago: http://homepage.mac.com/mark.allerton/archives/000013.html
I've got a Nokia 3650 and a MSI Bluetooth card on a Windows 2k machine and BT works fine, though admittedly initially with some bugs. Installing the latest drivers actually cleared all the little problems I had up. The setup process is definitely obtuse, but honestly it was no more technical than my NetGear WiFi card.
After the setup, Bluetooth works as advertised. I can browse the web from my phone across the apartment without problems. At the recent Symbian conference I sat in an auditorium with 1000 other people all with Bluetooth phones and there were no problems detecting or sending/receiving data over Bluetooth even with all that potential interference (I doubt they were all on or working, but still).
Just because this guy couldn't get this random PocketPC device to talk to his random computers doesn't mean that the technology sucks, it just means that guy's pretty clueless and the Bluetooth marketing guys aren't any help.
Bluetooth is about devices, not about computers. Playing a 3D racing game on your intelliphone over Bluetooth (set up in < 15 seconds) will make a believer in the tech, honestly.
;-)
-Russ
what do you mean by installing the latest drivers? do you mean to update windows?
i also have a 3650 sad to say the pc couldnt detect the cellfone...i also have a msi bluetooth