Should We Give Up On Bluetooth?

Audent asks: "I've been reading (and writing) about 'Bluetooth ^[?] Coming Soon!' for what seems like years now... Is it time to give up? Where are the products? Where are the new devices that promise piconetworks and the like? And what about the risks from having an entire network of Bluetoothed devices beaming around this already saturated office of mine (100 people plus PCs plus printers, scanners, laptops, palmtops, cellphones times Bluetooth equals...?) I know they run on the same band as microwave ovens (2.4GHz) but they won't interfere with each other but are we all going to be cooked by these tiny chips? Or will Bluetooth take off in the way USB did once the first products came out in commercial quantities?" Bluetooth sounds great on paper, but have life's realities proven too much in terms of getting working implementations out of the door?

Comments

What, give up?!?

[Bud]

Hey, Bluetooth has been in the making for several years but it's definitely not outdated! On the contrary, it's just on time.

• The speed of Bluetooth (up to 115kbps) is enough for most uses.
  
• Power requirements are LOW (milliwatts) making the chips very embeddable.
  
• No line-of-sight required! This will create a new breed of interconnected devices -- lots of small specialized gadgets that live in your coat pocket or your bag and don't do very much on their own -- but what little they do, they do extremely well. (Compare to the Unix way, with hundreds of specialized command line utilities.)
  
• Authentication and encryption -- only you can connect to your mobile phone.
  
• Bluetooth is reputedly a sturdier protocol than WLAN, meaning that it won't suffer as much from clashes. (OK, the microwave oven is the clear winner here...)
  
• The first Bluetooth-enabled devices are appearing on the market NOW.
  

Bluetooth is going to be a winner.

--Bud