Friday, June 17, 2005

Bluetooth: A tooth too long?

Cellphones, Smartphones, Blackberry, Windows Mobile, Palm etcetera etcetera ALL want to grab a market share of a booming 'mobile small devices' category. Each vendor adopts different standards, so sharing information between them ain't no simple task.

Bluetooth, which sounds great is yet to see the light of day. A device which is Bluetooth enabled contributes to only 50% of the equation. A USB cable has to be used inorder to sync the contents with a PC. The device in turn should be compatible with a email clients like Microsoft Outlook, Evolution etc. To add to the woes, the cable is usually not bundled with the device and is sold as an accessory. From the Operating System point of view, pre Windows XP SP2, doesn't support Bluetooth well and may not work at all. Add to this the motherboard manufactures who have been extremely slow in releasing Bluetooth enabled motherboards. Laptops and Notebooks have pretty good support for WI-Fi.

Open Source pundits commonly proclaim, "Open Standards are Good". But what is the point, if the standards are not enforced in the first place. I think the only way a standard becomes mainstream is for a giant to come-a-long and implement it. In this case, Microsoft. With Windows XP SP2, and Windows Mobile 5, Microsoft's goal is to allow a seamless integration between devices. Maybe we're getting there, but slowly.

Now what we need, are Bluetooth enabled printers, home theatre systems, digital cameras and a whole slew of gadgets!

Products which support Bluetooth