Bluetooth wireless standard gaining traction

Whatever happened to Bluetooth, the wireless technology named after a Danish king?

With all of the attention surrounding the Wi-Fi standard for wireless Internet access, Bluetooth has gotten lost in the shuffle. Bluetooth and Wi-Fi were both hyped in the late 1990s, but their fates soon diverged. Wi-Fi became the star of wireless, while Bluetooth languished.

Wi-Fi is now available at airports, bookstores, cafes and hotels, allowing notebook computers equipped with special Wi-Fi cards to connect wirelessly to the Internet. Borders Books, Hilton Hotels, Intel, even McDonald's -- all have made announcements in recent weeks about efforts to promote the spread of Wi-Fi to the masses.

And Bluetooth? The technology is named for a Viking, but it hasn't conquered much of anything.

Whereas Wi-Fi has gained popularity as a way to connect to the Internet wirelessly, early visions for Bluetooth -- as a way to create ad-hoc networks of devices connecting wirelessly to each other and to the Internet -- have given way to less grandiose plans. Bluetooth is now being viewed primarily as a way to exchange information wirelessly between PCs, printers, mobile phones, MP3 players, telephone headsets, and other devices.

Will Bluetooth ever be anything but an overhyped, underachieving has-been in the wireless arena? Or is it possible Bluetooth will gain traction -- albeit, several years after its proponents predicted it would be standard in "hundreds of millions" of cameras, cell phones and other electronic devices?

A number of signs point toward the likelihood Bluetooth will soon enter the lexicon of consumers.

Proponents now view Bluetooth as a cheap, practical way to reduce cable clutter. Like Wi-Fi, Bluetooth works by transmitting radio waves from one device to another over an unlicensed slice of the radio spectrum. Bluetooth operates on a shorter range than Wi-Fi, typically around 30 feet.

The Bluetooth Special Interest Group, a nonprofit trade association, develops and promotes the technology behind Bluetooth. Members include Intel, Nokia, Microsoft and other computing and telecommunications companies.

With Bluetooth in digital cameras, printers and PDAs, the tangle of wires for printing or transferring address books and photos would be a thing of the past. Consider these uses: You walk into your office with your cell phone, and without having to think about it, the phone's address book synchronizes automatically with the one on your PC. You set your digital camera next to your computer to transfer photos between the two. You walk down the street, with your cell phone inside your backpack, even as you talk to a friend via a wireless headset.

But this points toward one of the barriers for Bluetooth: You need two Bluetooth-equipped devices -- a PC and a digital camera, a cell phone and a headset, and so forth -- for the technology to work. Until lots of devices have Bluetooth as a standard feature, why think about it?

That attitude has been a challenge for Bluetooth, but the technology may be near a turning point, with more and more devices integrating Bluetooth as a standard feature.

Apple Computer's latest models of its PowerBooks, for instance, now come Bluetooth-ready. Sony offers a Bluetooth digital camera, while cell phone makers, such as Ericsson and Nokia, now offer Bluetooth models. Microsoft offers a Bluetooth mouse and keyboard. And if you've got one Bluetooth-ready device, you may seek out others able to connect to it.

Yes, the word "revolutionize" still appears at the official Bluetooth site -- as does the talk of the "inevitable" Bluetooth briefcases, fridges and pens -- but proponents of the technology have, for the most part, scaled back the hype. The site's examples now surround basic, helpful things, like synchronizing your PDA with your PC.

A laudable goal, this joining of devices, and one worthy of the technology's namesake, Harald Bluetooth, who was known for uniting two Scandinavian kingdoms.

By Allan Hoffman
Last updated: Sunday, April 13, 2003, 10:12 am