Buzzword-enabled wireless wonders

Wednesday, December 13, 2000

Every now and then, a trend comes along that is so pervasive that it seems every company finds a way to hitch its wagon on for a ride. Right now, that trend is Bluetooth.

The word "convergence" used to merely mean combining our PCs and television sets. But when you add "Bluetooth" to the name, convergence can suddenly include the mobile Internet, personal GPS, and peer-to-peer networking. Several companies announced their latest products at the Bluetooth Developers' Conference (www.bluetooth.com/devcon), held in San Jose earlier this month.

Parthus (www.parthus.com) unveiled a Bluetooth-enabled MP3 player, which would allow students to trade song files in the classroom. Wireless peer-to-peer networking could also be applied to readers sharing audio books, or business execs sharing dictation notes.

Also from Parthus was a Bluetooth-enabled GPS (global positioning system), which could be applied to locating cellular 911-callers, or for more pedestrian tasks such as wireless toll collection. Parthus is also predicting wireless e-commerce applications such as parking meters, vending machines, and ticket machines.

And Jungo (www.jungo.com) showed off its OpenRG (residential gateway) software, running on Texas Instruments' (www.ti.com) Bluetooth-enabled broadband cable modems. With wireless WAN giving residential consumers high-speed Internet connections, Jungo is offering to manage the distribution of all that data through the various networks of the Webified home.

Finally, Enea OSE Systems (www.enea.com) announced that its OSE(TM) realtime operating system (RTOS) would be used in the Bluetooth-based Personal Trusted Device (PTD), from First Access (www.access-1.com). With OSE's continuous uptime, PTD users could access wireless local networks and remotely monitor Internet appliances and home networking devices.

Although the demonstrations are impressive, the challenges to mobile computing remain the same-a successful appliance will have to keep its power consumption and cost very low, and keep its form factor very small. Time will tell if anyone can clear those hurdles.