Bluetooth Fever

I came down with a bad case of Bluetooth fever recently. My temperature was running about 802.15.1 and the only thing I could think about was connectivity. In my feverish state I envisioned an assortment of Bluetooth devices helping me connect my Pocket PC to just about anything, and doing away with the strangling mass of cables I have to carry around with me on trips. Many Pocket PCs, including most new iPAQs, have Bluetooth buit-in. With the release of so many new Bluetooth products in the last few months, my condition has been steadily getting worse. At this rate, I may never recover!

Named after the Danish king Harald Bluetooth who united Scandinavia in the early 900s A.D., Bluetooth was conceived in 1994 by scientists at Ericsson, the Swedish cell phone maker. It has evolved through a number of standards over the years, and was recently incorporated into the IEEE 802.15.1 standard, a new standard for WPANs (Wireless Personal Area Networks). Bluetooth operates at 2.4 GHz, the same frequency band as Wi-Fi (802.11), but at much lower power than Wi-Fi. While the lower power gives Bluetooth a shorter range than that of Wi-Fi, it also greatly decreases the power drain on batteries, making my Pocket PC (and yours) run longer. Bluetooth uses “spread-spectrum” technology, meaning that it skips randomly among 79 channels in the 2.4 GHz band to increase security and reduce noise. With a range of about 30 feet, Bluetooth can be used for creating a Personal Area Network (PAN) as a replacement for the usual nest of peripheral cables, or with a group of up to seven other Bluetooth-enabled devices to form an ad hoc mini-network (a piconet).

Initially, I wasn’t impressed with Bluetooth. I was mainly interested in connecting my Pocket PC to a wireless LAN, and Wi-Fi is much faster and does a better job with this. Then I realized that many connections don’t require blistering transmission speeds. It’s sometimes better to have a somewhat slower connection that is easier to connect and consumes less power. This is what Bluetooth excels at.

Connecting a Pocket PC to another PC

Bluetooth makes it easy to connect your Windows Mobile device to a desktop PC and sync data or transfer files. It’s faster than using an infrared connection, but not as fast as Wi-Fi. Fortunately, the speed difference isn’t very noticeable unless you’re transferring a lot of data—for example, a number of video and audio files. A Bluetooth connection to your desktop PC is fine for basic Outlook data synchronization. It also works well for browsing the Web from a Pocket PC connected to a desktop PC. This is true because the Bluetooth connection is faster than most desktop PC broadband connections. Below are two Bluetooth solutions that can help you with this.

D-Link’s Wireless USB Bluetooth Adapter (DBT-120) (http://www.dlink.com) is a 1 1/4-inch-long Bluetooth adapter that connects to any USB port on your PC (Fig. 1). It is an unobtrusive and highly portable solution that I use with my desktop PC, a Gateway Media Center PC, a notebook PC, and a tablet PC to connect them to my Toshiba e800 Pocket PC, which has built-in Bluetooth. The DBT-120 comes bundled with the desktop PC Bluetooth Communications Software for Windows (BTW) from Widcomm (http://www.widcomm.com). This software includes a large variety of profiles, which lets you connect your PC to almost any Pocket PC or other Bluetooth-enabled product. The DBT-120 retails for under $50.00.

Fig. 1: The D-Link Bluetooth adapter (lower right of image) lets you add Bluetooth capability to any USB-equipped PC, including the Gateway Media Center PC (FMC-901X) shown here.