Ever since I got my first BlackBerry almost a year ago I have been in love with almost all aspects of the device.  One area that I am not all that found of, however, is the headset only Bluetooth.  I guess that I should say headset,  keyboard, and soon to be released smart card only Bluetooth.  Research in Motion has disabled Bluetooth data functionality for security it reasons so many of the cool Bluetooth gadgets and applications such as business card readers and unit to unit file and contact transfer are not available to users of arguably the most popular PDA on the market. 

I understand the security reasons behind Research in Motions decision to limit Bluetooth functionality.  Many of their corporate and government agency customers require secure devices for their production implementations of BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES).  What Research in Motion needs to think about, however, is that not all BlackBerry users need this level of security.  Can you imagine Dell or IBM disabling Bluetooth or Wi-Fi in all their laptops because it is against corporate policy of a few of their customers?  They would never go to lengths that drastic.  They would, and do, give the administrators of those organisations the ability to disable that functionality when the devices are set up. 

This is why Research in Motion should add the ability to enable or disable Bluetooth on BlackBerry Enterprise Server.  Let the organization decide the level of security that they want to implement.  Some organisations don’t want Bluetooth enabled at all so even the handicapped version is still seen as a security vulnerability.  Research in Motion still makes over half it’s revenue from BlackBerry handheld sales so they need to be careful not to send customers to competition with more functionality on their handhelds such as Microsoft, Good Technology, and others.