Whether it’s Bluetooth, Wi-Fi or whatever, wireless networking systems have one common trait: they don’t work yet. Every wireless network system I’ve ever used out of the box required far more IT knowledge to get working than most end users (come to that, most IT helpdesk employees) have.
It shouldn’t, for example, take four hours to connect your mobile phone to your computer. The process shouldn’t require you to uninstall your Bluetooth card and then reinstall it with an obsolete driver. It shouldn’t then require you to uninstall the phone synchronisation software and reinstall it to work with the obsolete driver. Once all this is done, you shouldn’t then need to turn the phone and computer on and off several times, and then spend an hour looking through web forums to see if anyone has run into the same problem.
Ideally, the ultimate solution should not involve finding someone who admits that the correct process just *is* arbitrary and insane, and that you have to ignore all printed instructions and common sense.
Oh well, I guess it’s kept me out of the pub. And now I can post silly pictures like this one:
Hooray!
You could have written this before I went out last Thursday evening and bought myself a wireless ADSL router, and went through the pain of setting it up today…
Bluetooth is utter bollocks, yes, although it does make bluejacking possible, which is cool. Seems to be very good phone-to-phone, but shite phone-to-PC. (It gets kudos points for being named after a dead Viking, though.)
But I’ve been quite surprised at how reliable wireless networking is. BT Voyager wireless modems couldn’t be much easier to use. I’ve got a 3com now, and it’s less user-friendly than a Voyager, but still pretty easy.