Blue Headache
Most of us are familiar with Bluetooth, the ubiquitous technology found in most mobile phones and a large variety of devices, allowing wireless connectivity. Bluetooth was named after a late tenth century king, Harald Bluetooth, King of Denmark and Norway. He is known for his unification of previously warring tribes from Denmark (including now Swedish Scania, where the Bluetooth technology was invented), and Norway.
However, I propose we change the name from Bluetooth to BlueHeadache, because that's what occurs when you try to connect the freaking devices. I have a Bluetooth and Wi-Fi capable PocketPC Phone (the HTC Alpine), and recently purchased Bluetooth Jabra Stereo Headphones with A2DP and a Bluetooth GPS receiver. The GPS still doesn't work after a week of trial and error, though on the bright side, it only took two days to get the headphones working! It involved a registry hack and a kernel-level patch. Seriously, you'd think it'd be marginally easier to achieve 'wireless freedom'. Its certainly understandable that ensuring compatibility with a wide range of devices is not simple, but they could have done a better job.
The way the profiles/services system looks good on paper, but when hardware vendors don't bother adhering to a more stringent set of common standards, the results are pure frustration. On top of that, there is not much you can do, because on the computer side, the components are limited in the tweaking sense, and if you're hooking up to something like a GPS receiver...well, there's really nothing you can do when the damn phone can't detect the correct serial profile for the GPS.
There are revisions, specifically Bluetooth 1.2, 2.0, and even a proposed 3.0, but they are not in consumer products yet, and it may be a while before they will be. One can only hope they managed to improve compatibility between devices. On the bright side, barring the instances when both my phone and headphones flat out refuse to work (and that happens randomly), it sure is fun having wireless audio...also disregarding the fact that it stutters when I use the phone, and when I walk out of a room. Once I managed to get the remote buttons on my headphones to work using the AVRCP profile, it is very convenient to listen to music. There is still the matter of my now useless GPS receiver though...the damn thing won't even work with my laptop's Bluetooth adapter.