NETWORKING
No one says Bluetooth is a bad idea, but if you haven't heard of the wireless standard, which touts itself as a "liberation of communication" and an "end to wires," you ain't missing much yet. The first products carrying the radio-frequency transceivers won't come out until year's end, and even then it will take an office full of Bluetooth copiers, printers, desktop PCs, and servers to make the system really hum.
Five founding members, including Intel and Ericsson, formed the Bluetooth Special Interest Group in early 1998. SIG's mantra states that Bluetooth will let multiple devices connect simultaneously within a 30-foot range of one another by sending short bursts of radio waves - no wires needed. And because Bluetooth relies on radio-frequency networking, it works through walls and supports multiple point-to-point connections.
Shortly after SIG made Bluetooth official, the hype machine kicked into overdrive: Mobile Computing praised Bluetooth as the "best future technology," and geek guru Andrew Seybold called the adoption of Bluetooth a "no-brainer."
Now, almost a year later, the companies that signed on to develop Bluetooth products are cagey about giving hard dates. "We want to make sure what we deliver meets expectations," says Simon Ellis, head Bluetooth wonk for Intel. Gary Elsasser, Toshiba's vice president of product planning, is equally vague, talking mostly about "goals" instead of actual products and specific compatibility. Meanwhile, Ericsson, Nokia, Toshiba, IBM, and some 300-plus other companies under the SIG umbrella could easily spend more than $100 million on R&D. But even with that big investment, Bluetooth is no slam dunk. "The marketing side might be setting expectations too high," says Andrew Till, a technology strategist for SIG member Psion Dacom. "And the tech guys cringe when they hear that kind of stuff."
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