April 11, 2005

Bluetooth: It's Growing Up. Use It More.

Bluetooth is a technology with so much potential but used so little. For the most part Bluetooth is used to connect wireless headsets with cellular phones and not much more but that's changing and consumers are using it for more things.

As I posted ealier some of the blame for the lack of Bluetooth growth falls on wireless carriers who want to make money (understandably) rather than promote a technology.

Low battery life was one problem of Bluetooth devices in the past.

However Business Week writes But now you can get a Logitech Mobile Bluetooth headset for under $50. And the $140 Jabra BT800, which lets you control many cell-phone functions on the headset, offers six hours of talk time and five days of standby. After that, you can recharge by running a USB cable from the headset into a laptop so you don't need to take a charger with you. A headset on the way from Plantronics will come with adapters that allow charging from most phone adapters or from an AA battery.

Bluetooth is also moving beyond hands-free phone use. Although Microsoft (MSFT ) is a "promoter member" of the Bluetooth Special Interest Group that is responsible for the standard, Bluetooth support in Windows remains primitive. Not so with Apple Computer (AAPL ). The technology is standard in many Apple Macintoshes and optional in the rest, and with its new line of PowerBook laptops, Apple is the first to use a new, faster version of Bluetooth. If a Mac detects a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse during setup, it will automatically link to them.

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