It always kind of sucked though. You had to go through the pairing process, and then the transfer was incredibly slow since Bluetooth is very low bandwidth.

It’s still a classic Apple “the open standard sucks so build a proprietary one that’s great but only on iPhone”

It worked and it was good enough

At 1Mbit. It was good enough but it absolutely sucks today. Meanwhile AirDrop is hundreds of megabit to a gigabit.

Trying to send a video file over Bluetooth would be miserable.

What are you actually arguing here?

You could do it even before phones came with Bluetooth via Infrared. Granted, the two phones had to be placed perfectly for the IR sensors to connect, if you moved them the file transfer would break.

Bluetooth was a huge upgrade because you no longer needed to do that.

I recall getting very surprised when my sister got one of the first Windows phones (one with the tile menu) and it didn’t support this feature.

i think microsoft really messed up. windows phone could have been huge. i thought they were going to be. i guess things like this didn't help. they really didn't play their cards right.