Want to Bluetooth?

Want to Bluetooth? Well, according to the PC Magzine article Is Bluetooth Better on the Mac?, it is better and easier on a Mac -- I can attest to that having tried to setup Bluetooth on both my Windows XP box and my iBook 600. On the iBook, it was true plug-and-play. On Windows XP it was a matter of having a driver disc and a lot of prayers -- and even after that, it was still a lot of flakiness, including a huge annoyance of random system reboots. "[i]When it comes down to it, there are still too many seams showing in Bluetooth on Windows.[/i]" I also had problems with the CSR Bluetooth driver for Windows XP wanting to reboot my system whenever it wanted to. That was a [i]slight[/i] annoyance, especially when I was working on a long document. "[i][T]he Mac mystique has some substance behind it. Setting up my whole Bluetooth network on the Mac was quick and painless from start to finish.[/i]" Forward looking, Apple's hardware and software design has always taken into account adopting technologies early instead of the wait-and-see approach that Microsoft takes. The upcoming SP2 release for Windows XP has built-in support for Bluetooth, but it maybe too little, too late for Microsoft to catch up in the game. But, it is still nice to see that Microsoft can still follow even if it cannot innovate. Now all Microsoft will have to do is come up with something like iSync, iCal, and Address Book to add to Windows XP for free and they will have something that is competitive with Mac OS X from yesteryear. Of course, if Microsoft did come up with those three pieces of software, someone (US DOJ or EU) will say that they are trying to monopolize. I guess Microsoft really can't win either way. Oh well.