March Madness

For college basketball fans "March Madness" means the NCAA playoffs. For me, it meant three tradeshows in less than three weeks in two different countries. For both, the finals were in New Orleans.

My March Madness started with a flight to Germany to attend the giant CeBIT fair in Hanover. This was the first time I've been to CeBIT and to say it is overwhelming is an understatement! Spread over 25 exhibit halls, it dwarfs COMDEX, the largest computer tradeshow in the U.S., and it seemed that some of the booths were bigger than some of the exhibit halls at smaller shows (Fig. 1). Many booths had a second-story mezzanine while others had coffee or even beer bars in the booth! Unfortunately, since CeBIT overlapped the CTIA show that I needed to attend the following week, I had to cut short my visit to CeBIT after a few days of meetings with Thomas Rundel, my partner in our new BluetoothNews.com Web site. But Thomas and I made good use of the two days we had in Hanover, visiting the show from opening until closing each day. Of course, even then we had to skip many of the 25 exhibit halls, but since our focus was on handheld computing and wireless communications, I think we managed to see what we needed to see.

Fig. 1. The IBM booth at CeBIT, with 50-inch plasma displays, seems to go on forever.

From Germany, I flew off to New Orleans to attend the cellular telephone industry's big show--CTIA. Fortunately for me, starting on the last day of CTIA at the same venue was the Microsoft Mobility Developer Conference, which lasted three days. So what's new? The following is a synopsis of all three events.

Bluetooth Everywhere

On the first day of CeBIT, Thomas and I concentrated on the halls dedicated to mobile phones and accessories. After a few hours, I lost count of the number of Bluetooth headsets and USB "dongles" we saw. Although some were unique, most of them appeared to be made by the same one or two manufacturers in Asia, just with different branding on them. Of course, seeing that certain Bluetooth products have become commodities is not a bad thing--especially for consumers. This shows that after years of false starts, Bluetooth is finally gaining some traction. I think that by this time next year most Pocket PCs will include integrated Bluetooth--much the way that IrDA ports are the standard now.

While it was nice to see the vast number of headsets and USB dongles, which signal lower prices to come, the more interesting products were the ones that help expand people's thinking of how Bluetooth can be used.

Toshiba was a great example of a company that does this. First, they were showing their Bluetooth external hard drive. While currently only offered in a 5 GB size, this little wonder can run all day sitting inside your briefcase and acting as the storage medium for your Pocket PC or laptop. Imagine taking it to your office and setting your briefcase alongside your desk with a Bluetooth USB dongle on your PC. You store your data on this disk; then, when you take your briefcase to a client's office, your files are available for use on your Bluetooth-enabled Pocket PC.

Toshiba was also showing a stereo headset using Bluetooth! Despite the slow transfer rate of Bluetooth 1.1, Toshiba was able to attain high-fidelity sound. They do this by transmitting the music in a compressed format, then doing the decompression within the headset. The demo was performed using Microsoft Media Player on a Toshiba e740 Pocket PC (Fig. 2).

Fig. 2. Toshiba stereo Bluetooth headset.