The Blue dental plan

Got a bluetooth dongle today... Small - black - cheap. Hooked it up to my usual USB port out back and inserted the mini CD that came bundled with it... imiddiately the autorun.ini launched setup.exe and installed all the needed drivers for my device. The software driver is called "BlueSoleil". And why the hell is this the only type of software that comes bundled with any bluetooth device?! It's slow, buggy and crashes so frequently that you have to launch the task manager while transferring a simple file accross the air! Fortunately, version 6 of BlueSoleil is allot more user friendly and integrateable with Windows Vista. Unfortunately - it costs money and imposes a 5MB limit on data transfer. Damn.

Just for the sake of it, I launched MacOSX to see if it will at least try to recognize my Bluetooth device. Needless to say - it did. And the simplicity of the built-in solution for MacOS was so astonishing that it made me cry when I went back to that piece of crap that BlueSoleil is! It creates a Bluetooth icon next to the volume section on the title bar and contains a few basic options - Send, Browse, Options + some additional features... but certainly NO functionless bloat that BlueSoleil carries!

Why can't every hardware manufacturer create a software driver for their device that does not introduce 5 links on your desktop, a background service with so much bloat that it gobbles up tens of megabytes of RAM, at least 1 system tray application to advertise it's presence and all the instability, crashes and even bluescreens that you can imagine?

Add comment May 24th, 2008