I jumped onto the Bluetooth bandwagon a few weeks ago. I had been hearing about the technology for months. Of how Bluetooth removes the clutter of cables from your desktop. Of how your computer, mobile phone and PDA can wirelessly synchronize with each other. Of how a range of Bluetooth devices around your house, all using it’s low-power short-range communications abilities, would make the smart home a reality. Of Ericsson’s experiments with using a Bluetooth phone as a replacement for a credit card to facilitate faster checkouts at a store. And yet, all of this was just potential, still untapped. Bluetooth was not a wild success story yet. Nobody had yet created a killer application that used Bluetooth to do something fantastic that couldn’t be done before. The best I came across was the ability to send and receive SMS messages from your desktop, and at over Rs. 15,000 for a decent Bluetooth capable phone, the ability was totally unworthy of the price.

And then one likely candidate appeared. Salling Software’s Sony Ericsson Clicker (SEC) for Mac OS X lets you program a menu on to your phone that executes scripts to control applications on your desktop. Use it to switch tracks on your media player, navigate through slides on your presentation, control your mouse and do just about anything that you can write a script for. And so of course now my interest was piqued. I use an Apple PowerBook running Mac OS X. All I needed was a USB Bluetooth adapter from D-Link and a Sony Ericsson phone (other phones do not have the programmable menu abilities of the SE phones). D-Link doesn’t sell their USB Bluetooth adapter in India, but Nokia sells a Bluetooth kit for their 6210i phone which includes a PCMCIA Bluetooth adapter. But a quick Google search revealed that it didn’t come with drivers for Mac OS X and third-party drivers cost more than I was willing to pay, so D-Link it had to be, and I asked a friend visiting California to pick up one for me from the Apple store.

A week after he returned with my adapter, I got myself a Sony Ericsson T68i. The software setup was non-trivial but straightforward. Unlike IrDA, Bluetooth is omni-directional. You can’t just point two phones at each other and beam your address card across because the phone across the hall will also receive the transmission. Bluetooth therefore requires devices to authenticate with each other first. Once I had my computer paired with my phone, I was set. I can now point at a phone number in my address book and tell the phone to dial. When an SMS arrives, I don’t have to rummage around for the phone because the message is already showing on my screen, from where I can either save it or send a reply. I can synchronize my address book and calendar with the phone so I don’t have to maintain each separately. Using SEC’s proximity sensor, I can have my computer stop playing music when I walk out of the room and start again when I return. When making a presentation, I have the freedom to walk around and still switch slides without having to return to the laptop, and without needing a minion assigned to spacebar-duty.

My friend who visited California happened to meet Steve “Woz” Wozniak of Apple fame there and described to me how Woz uses Bluetooth. The American cellular service company Cingular offers a scheme where you can get up to four phones in a family pack, and all communications between these four phones is free. Woz has two phones on this scheme. One sits at home connected to a DSL line, the other sits in his pocket with Bluetooth enabled. When Woz wants to get online, he uses his laptop to make a data connection over Bluetooth to the phone in his pocket, which in turn makes a data call to his phone back home, which is connected to a DSL line. Woz can get online from anywhere in the US without a phone line or a network connection, for free. To hell with all the hype about WiFi.

So if there are funky things that can be done with Bluetooth, why isn’t everyone using it yet? Let’s look at Woz's case again: something like that isn’t possible in India. Sure, Indian cellular providers have schemes for free calls between phones, but that doesn’t include free data calls. If you want data at a reasonable speed, it will cost you an arm and a leg, and Bluetooth is really all about data.

At a more fundamental level, there are still no killer applications. SEC isn’t much fun after you’re done with the initial drooling, and it’s only available for the Apple platform, which has less than 3% of the worldwide desktop market. There is no equivalent available for Windows and Linux, and without a killer application, a rapid price drop is unlikely. Current prices are exorbitantly high. An average Bluetooth phone costs upward of Rs. 15,000 and you still can’t do anything with it until you get another Bluetooth device. D-Link’s USB Bluetooth Adapter is priced at $49 at the Apple Store, which is about Rs. 2,500, but the average technology user will be more interested in something like a Bluetooth hands-free kit to go with their Bluetooth phone, and the prices there are really killer: an average Bluetooth hands-free kit in India costs over Rs. 6000. In contrast, you can get a regular hands-free kit for the phone you already have today for Rs. 150.

Beyond these, there aren’t even many Bluetooth devices available. You can get a Bluetooth adapter for your printer, but it takes over the parallel port and then you have to either Bluetooth enable your entire network or share it over the network again from another Bluetooth enabled computer. You might as well get one WiFi base station and be done with the hassle.

As it stands today, Bluetooth does little more than eliminate cables at a very high price. If you really want the benefits of the technology, you’ll only get it with large scale adoption, and therein lies the dilemma. Unless prices drop significantly, technology users will not adopt it. Unless there is demand, prices will not drop. If a killer application appears, it could remedy the situation by making people more willing to pay, but no one has figured one out yet.