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by Ben Last.
Original Post: Bluetooth, Bluetooth Everywhere
Feed Title: The Law Of Unintended Consequences
Feed URL: http://benlast.livejournal.com/data/rss
Feed Description: The Law Of Unintended Consequences
I've been at a show. The Symbian Expo, to be exact, in fair London City. Well, the rather-less-fair Docklands part of it, but hey; trade shows will be held and those seeking to engage in commerce must attend.
Anyway, one of the tasks that I was carrying out was installing The Mobile Phone Project onto Series 60 handsets for people to play with, crow over and generally applaud/denigrate. To do this, I had the choice of:
Infra-red; delicate positioning of handsets, the eternal search for what obscure bit of the casing is actually the IR "eye", the slow data exchange. I think not.
Just pop your memory card in here...; have you ever tried that? Guaranteed route to odd runtime errors until you get around to formatting the damn thing.
Bluetooth; fast RF transfer - batching up of files... yes! Let's Do It That Way.
Now, there are those commentators (mostly American) who will assure you that Bluetooth Is Dead. Perhaps they should fire up a Bluetooth-equipped laptop in the middle of a mobile phone trade show in Europe and see what they get. Remember - Bluetooth range is limited; we were only seeing devices that were enabled and discoverable (around 50%) within a few metres.
The big problem was finding someone's handset to do the actual transfer. What the image doesn't show you is that nearly every 6600 out there has the Bluetooth name "Nokia 6600". I'll bet you can guess what the other Nokia models were called. Thus you'd have to check that Bluetooth was on, that the handset was discoverable, that the name was distinguishable, wait up to a minute for the Bluetooth stack to report all the devices it could see... and after that, you needed to put in PIN numbers and accept transfers.
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