It's been slow going for Bluetooth's wireless gadgets, but this could be the year they connect.
Unless you've got money to burn, chances are your cell phone and notebook aren't equipped with Bluetooth wireless technology. Even if you're willing to pay the premium, the selection of products is slim: Ericsson offers cell phones and headsets that connect wirelessly using Bluetooth, so you can chat hands-free, and IBM and Toshiba sell PC Cards for adding the short-range radio technology to your notebook. That, however, may turn into a smorgasbord of Bluetooth gadgets in the next few months.
Coming of Age Nearly three years after it was announced, Bluetooth is on the verge of maturity. Last week the Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG) released a revision of the first-generation Bluetooth specification and announced that it would soon begin work on upping the transfer speed from 720 Kbps to 2 Mbps and later, even 10 Mbps.
The latest specification clears up several ambiguities that occasionally hampered device interaction, says Rajiv Kumar, chief technology officer and cofounder of Widcomm, whose Bluetooth for Windows lets PC manufacturers equip their systems with the technology. "The 1.1 spec makes it much more probable that most devices will be interoperable. The 1.0b spec was often easy to misinterpret, especially when it came to the lower layers of the Bluetooth stack, where devices first try to talk to each other," he says.
The latest version benefits from several Unplug Fests, where thousands of companies congregated to test Bluetooth products. "At each one of these Unplug Fests, we learn more and more about how to improve the specification," says Simon Ellis, chairman of the SIG marketing team and a marketing manager at Intel, a Bluetooth founder.
Send a Fax to a Cell Phone For phones, headsets, notebooks, hand-helds, and other gadgets to recognise each other, multiple device profiles need to be supported. Bluetooth supports these profiles and will continue to bring new ones on-board. "We will soon roll out a printing profile, so you'll be able to receive a fax on your cell phone and then send it on to a printer for printing," says Ellis.
Most Bluetooth applications work adequately at 720 Kbps, but some applications, such as real-time audio and video, will need more bandwidth. "This is relevant in the consumer electronics or hi-fi areas, where Bluetooth needs to send audio from a stereo to five different surround sound speakers," says Ellis. The second generation Bluetooth specification will support 10 Mbps. Designed for more demanding applications, 10-Mbps Bluetooth devices will be more expensive and will probably carry a different name -- something along the lines of Bluetooth Extra. The next version of the standard Bluetooth may support 2 Mbps.
When will Bluetooth really take off? "My feeling is that in one year's time, we will see typical laptop computers and home appliances talking to each other through Bluetooth chips," says Behzad Razavi, a professor of electrical engineering at UCLA, who is researching Bluetooth.
Some industry watchers are more conservative. "Bluetooth won't become noticeable to the average person on the street until 2003," Joyce Putscher, a senior analyst at Cahners In-Stat Group. But she does expect that the 1.1 spec will lead to a flood of new products. "The second and third quarters are going to be very active in terms of Bluetooth. People have been waiting for 1.1."
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