It should have been heaven, but Bluetooth failed to deliver a bite
Since my trip to Cebit in Hannover, Germany, in March, my enthusiasm for Bluetooth has been doused, in the short term anyway. For a gadget geek, there is no place better than Cebit, the biggest computer show in the world - 28 halls packed with the latest handheld computers, Internet appliances, wireless devices, 2.5G and 3G mobile phones and weird-looking gadgets we'll probably never see in Hong Kong. It was heaven.
It would have been better if more of the technologies on display had worked. Bluetooth was one of those disappointments.
A lot of expense and effort went into setting up a huge Bluetooth network that blanketed one of the halls. The idea was to help people use Bluetooth-enabled PDAs to navigate around the hall and download information. German wireless company Lesswire had installed 130 base stations in the ceiling of the 250,000 square metre hall.
Bluetooth was a 10th century Danish conqueror (Harald Blatand). It is also the name of the consortium led by Ericsson which is working on specifications for short-range packet-radio networking. Bluetooth devices communicate with each other via a high-frequency short-range radio transmission link. Bluetooth can link up to eight devices and can carry data and voice packets up to 722 Kbps over distances up to 10 metres. It works on the same 2.4GHz channels as microwave ovens, cordless phones and 802.11 wireless LAN. It is considered a big deal because it is inexpensive and the tiny chip can be embedded in everything from remote controls to mobile phones to cuff-links.
The technology is open standard so your Bluetooth phone can talk to Sam's Bluetooth printer, which can also accept instructions from Ben's Bluetooth PDA, all of which are within 10 metres of each other.
Sounds heavenly, doesn't it? Unfortunately, it is not the real picture. At Cebit, the hand-held was a Compaq iPaq and I failed to connect with any server in the hall. I kept getting the message 'Server not responding'. When it failed to work after trying for 10 minutes, I gave up. I found my way around the good old way - looking at the map.