Palm to Announce New Treo in September

bain writes "Reuters reports that Palm has committed to unveiling at least one of its next-gen Treos next month. It's believed that it will be the Windows Mobile-based UMTS model first mentioned for Vodafone in July." From the article: "The California-based firm said in July the new version will operate on Vodafone's high-speed third generation (3G) network and be powered by Microsoft Corp.'s Windows Mobile operating system, however details about the handset's functionality remain sketchy. The current 700p version of the latest Treo has a slot for Wi-Fi and Bluetooth cards, but with the latest Nokia, Sony Ericsson and O2 offerings all boasting the technology in-built, Palm knows it can not afford to fall further behind as the competition heats up."

Comments

Re:Sorry, Symbian 60 has won this Palm user

[Jahz]

I cannot find a phone that doesn't lock out all bluetooth communications when a headset is connected.

I like the idea of controlling multiple devices with a single BT master (which is what I htink you were describing) so I decided to check into this. Note that I am not an export of BT and have never read any of the specs until now. Okay, so Google pointed me to the Bluetooth website at http://www.bluetooth.com./ There you can find the architecture specs for the protocal.

The handsfree spec requires certain QoS guarantees, and imposes some requirements on the phones. For example, there can be only one handsfree (HF) device perl phone (AG). ALL sounds, including voice, KEY TONES, voice dialing, music, etc must be routed over the link to the HF device. For that reason cell for phones likely try to keep handsfree devices in the Active state for as long as they are connected. The important bits of text can be found in the Hands Free Specification, section 4.6:

Upon a user action or an internal event, either the HF or the AG may initiate the establishment of an Audio Connection whenever necessary. Further internal actions may be needed by the HF or the AG to internally route the audio paths.
An Audio Connection set up procedure always means the establishment of a SCO link and it is always associated with an existing Service Level Connection.
In principle, setting up an Audio Connection by using the procedure described in this section is not necessarily related to any call process.
Once an Audio Connection between the HF and the AG exists, the AG shall utilize the HF as its sole audio port. The AG shall keep the audio paths, call related or not, routed towards HF for all the operations (e.g. voice, alert, key press tones) involving presence of audio.

To elaborate, BT slave devices can be set to either Active or Parked. Parked devices can't talk back to the phone, but the phone still needs to transmit a beacon packet every time the slaves reserved time slice comes up. Active mode devices can communicate based on one of several protocols. Handsfree requires Synchronous Connection-Oriented or SCO, which provides 64Kb CDR audio communication. It also requires that the physical link connnection remain in the Active state.

Cell phones probably have very light BT stacks, including extremely limited buffers. That probably sets a hard limit on the number of devices that they can form active physical links with. To that end, the cell makers most likely set up handsfree systems to automatically park all other physical connections.

If you were thinking that the phones should then just set up a new BT network with other non HF devices, think again.
I found this paragraph in Section volume 1, section 4.1 of the Core specification titled "Piconet Topology"

A Bluetooth device may participate concurrently in two or more piconets. It
does this on a time-division multiplexing basis. A Bluetooth device can never
be a master of more than one piconet. (Since the piconet is defined by synchronization
to the master's Bluetooth clock it is impossible to be the master of
two or more piconets.) A Bluetooth device may be a slave in many independent
piconets.

Due to use of TDMA slices as the master channel, hosting more than once Piconet with the same master (or just on the same channel) would not work. If BT used CDMA, this would be possible. It should be possible for your phone to be a SLAVE to your other devices while MASTER to the handsfree.

Lesson: there is more to this than you think. The core spec alone is 1300 pages of IEEE dribble.