Bluetooth is a mess on Windows

Of all the Windows problems, this should be the easiest to fix

Image by 200 Degrees from Pixabay (with slight modification by the writer)

Bluetooth is not the most efficient way to transfer files but at times it is the most convenient one, especially while transferring small chunks of data — a word document, for instance. It is convenient until you happen to be using it on Windows 10 —Microsoft’s flagship product running on close to a billion devices. The core tenets of an ideal user experience are user-friendliness and intuition. Bluetooth on Windows is anything but user-friendly or intuitive.

Sending a 20 kb file from your PC to your smartphone should be a breeze, even with this somewhat clunky technology called Bluetooth. Sending one from a smartphone to another surely is. Not so on Windows. You right-click on the word file, select send to in the context menu that appears and sure enough, a list of your paired devices appears. You select one of them, presumably your smartphone, but the Next button is greyed out and there is no way to proceed. No hints, no error message, no pop-up to tell you what’s wrong.

The first time, it took me ages to figure out that the Bluetooth was inactive on my laptop and needed to be turned on from the Action center — or whatever it is that they are calling it now. How difficult can it be to notify the user that he needs to turn on his device Bluetooth to complete the file transfer?

Next, please! Not on Windows — screenshot by writer

If wouldn’t be so frustrating if that was the only problem…

Select a file on your smartphone, tap share and — unlike in Windows — a pop-up will prompt you to enable Bluetooth if it’s not already. You oblige and the file transfer progress bar appears, only to show that the file transfer was unsuccessful. Why? Because you have to explicitly select the option ‘Receive a File’ on the Windows Bluetooth menu, even if the device is turned on and the phone and PC are already paired. Why an incoming notification can’t tell me that someone wants to send me a file, whether I would like to receive it or not? In Windows, there is a notification for everything (even for emails I have read and deleted two days ago), except for an incoming Bluetooth file transfer.

YOU have to notify Windows to receive a file — not the other way around

Finally, you figure out how to receive a file on Windows. The painfully slow transfer (not Microsoft’s fault, mind you) is complete, and without giving it a second thought, you close the dialog box and open the File Explorer. Your file, however, is nowhere to be found. Because you failed to hit the finish button on the dialog box… Now repeat the process and feel frustrated all over because someone at Microsoft thought that it was a good idea to ask the user where to save the file AFTER the file transfer is finished, unlike in every other instance where you make that choice beforehand.

Miss ‘Finish’ and your file is gone

This might sound like a rant and that’s probably because it is. The issues are more of an annoyance than anything else and stem from poor design choices rather than difficult to fix technical hindrances. I mean, how hard can it be for a company with more than 150 thousand employees to design a half-decent file transfer interface for the world’s most commonly used operating system.

With every new Windows 10 update (and there are quite a few of them — fall, summer, winter, etc) I hope they would make the process more streamlined but it has remained the same old unintuitive frustrating mess — for more than 5 years now…