Bluetooth didn’t really hit mainstream until the arrival of chipsets that multiplexed Bluetooth and WiFi on the same radio+antenna. My memory is that happened sometime around 2007-2010.
At that point, the BOM cost to add Bluetooth to a laptop or smart device became essentially zero, why not include it? Modern smartphones with both Bluetooth and Wifi arrived at around the same time (I suspect these combo chipsets were originally developed for handheld devices, and laptops benefited)
And once Bluetooth was mainstream, we saw a steady rise in devices using Bluetooth.
WUSB operates on a completely different set of frequencies and technology and couldn’t share hardware with WiFi. Maybe it could have taken off if there was a killer app, but there never was.
Don't forget music piracy.
At least over here, a lot of kids had phones that did Bluetooth, and the primary use case for it was sharing songs they liked with each other. You could use infrared (IRDA) for that, and some people did before Bluetooth was common, but it was much slower.
This was mostly on low-end Nokias, maybe with a bit of Sony Ericsson thrown into the mix. They definitely did not have WiFi, in fact, Nokia even tried to limit internet over Bluetooth for usual carrier monopoly reasons as far as I'm aware, but Bluetooth was definitely there.
For many here, the iPhone not doing file and ringtone sharing over Bluetooth was one of its main limitations, at least early on. It was a social network in its own way, and having a device that couldn't participate in it was no fun.
The wireless headset was the killer app that drove bluetooth adoption within cellphones, driving down costs until eventually the lower-end models receiving it too. While sharing files was possible in the 1999-2005 era (especially with PDAs), most phones were lacking enough flash storage to store anything worthwhile.
While I don't want to say file sharing wasn't a killer app, it does seem to have been limited to just schools during a certain time period.
A time period that I missed out on by a few years. At high school, we did all our file sharing by swapping burned CDs. Then we switched to dragging around laptops and USB hard drives at university (and using the private emule network on the university wired ethernet).
Remember companies like jawbone?
I vaguely remember a cultural stereotype of bmw drivers driving aggressively and wearing Bluetooth headsets. [edit: this is the clip https://youtu.be/UqfAMvXpSw4?t=25 from top gear of jeremy clarkson wearing a bluetooth headset in sunglasses in a bmw, supposedly from topgear season 10, episode 10]
What you describe is file sharing, not necessarily piracy :-). Just nitpicking, I understand what you mean of course!
No BT stack in your product, no BT radio initialization, no BT/wifi multiplexing. At least in the (admittedly limited) chips I’ve worked with.
But the wireless headset is now a horrifying millstone making Bluetooth look like the world's stupidest trash fire. If you enable your microphone, you lose all audio from anything that doesn't want to use the microphone as the headset switches into "headset" mode and drops anything that wants to use "headphones" mode. There is no reason for there to even be two different modes.
Why is this still happening?
Implementing special requirements is always inconvenient for users because no B2C wants to risk bad the-microphone-didn’t-work reviews, customer returns, and support tickets.
Nevermind coordinating with arbitrary USB microphone latency…I’ve got one with 250ms of it.
I don't think you have any idea what you're saying. The scenario I'm describing is when you want to use a bluetooth headset that includes a microphone. Using a different microphone is how you solve the problem.
the bluetooth audio streaming profile enables more codecs, but only playback, and allows significantly higher latency that you wouldnt accept on a call
If you use Linux + KDE, you can still use any microphone or headphone, many at the same time, or in whatever mode you want.
It used to work on kde/plasma 5 at some point. And after a minor version update it stopped working.
Now the mic of my headset doesn't work because KDE insists that only the high quality sound output without mic is available. The mic + low quality output is gone from the settings.
Lucky for me this update also brought proper handling of the stereo positioned noise cancelling microphones on my thinkpad. So now I can actually enjoy the luxury of built-in microphones that work. Until the day it wont I guess.
This doesn't really seem to respond to the problem. The problem is that I'd like to use a single bluetooth device that includes earpieces and a microphone. That doesn't work, because of the headphone-headset mode dichotomy. As I replied to another comment, using multiple devices would be a solution to the problem. It wouldn't be an example of the problem that I want solved.
Bluetooth is apparently incapable of simply delivering an audio stream to the earpieces while accepting one from the microphone. This is a baffling design. The assumption appears to be that there will never be more than one source of audio for output. But that's crazy.
