Cell phone talks to laptop. laptop talks to Palm device. Palm talks to refrigerator. Everything's connected, without wires, through the magic of Bluetooth.
Yeah, right.
Bluetooth might be the darling of the media and the talk of the pundits, but the fledgling technology's future is cloudy at best. Despite repeated promises and numerous product "preannouncements," Bluetooth technology has yet to appear in any product on the market. Think Christmas. Next year.
Bluetooth is not a company but a wireless protocol developed and licensed by the Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG). This group consists of five founding companies (Ericsson, IBM, Intel, Nokia, and Toshiba) and four additional late joiners (Microsoft, 3Com, Motorola, and Lucent Technologies). The license is royalty free to promote widespread adoption, but it requires its nearly 2,000 licensees to adhere to the design specifications adopted by the SIG. Bluetooth works on radio signals transmitted over the globally available 2.4GHz band with a transmission and reception radius of approximately 30 feet.
