alt Hacker News> the wireless headset was the killer app in its early days
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.
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Wow this unlocked a bunch of memories from middle school where we would send each other the latest songs and games via bluetooth. I remember pirating games for my sony ericsson and sharing them with my friends and we would play these games in class. You could just share and install the .jar files. Good times
> Don't forget music piracy.
What you describe is file sharing, not necessarily piracy :-). Just nitpicking, I understand what you mean of course!
By "early days", I was more thinking about the 1999-2005 era, before low-end Nokias even got Bluetooth and the ability to play MP3s.
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).