HARDWARE
The Gist: Baby Steps In Close-range Connectivity
$149
It's called PAN, the personal area network, and I believe in it. I'm the guy who wants my answering machine to talk to my refrigerator, so that I can call it on my cell to see how much milk is left. The Bluetooth networking standard is designed to support this close-range connectivity, and 3Com's Bluetooth cards are the first step. Because none of my appliances, power tools, or vehicles have a card slot (yet), I hijacked my wife's laptop, only to discover that I had to upgrade it from Win98 to Win2K. I wondered, Is this the true nature of ubiquitous computing - endless upgrades whenever my new light switch won't talk to the old fan in the bathroom?
After installing the new OS and upgrading the software, it all works, and my personal computer cloud now encompasses two machines. Well-organized dialogs set preferences and security levels. Bluetooth communicates within a 33-foot radius, so I choose the lowest level of security - trust every device I can see (I'm at home). They call this kind of interface a transactional protocol, which means it's more like beaming data between Palms than hooking up to a LAN. But moving files between devices is drag-and-drop, as it should be.
I hook up one of the laptops to a phone line and a printer, and treat it like a base station. The other laptop has no difficulty accessing the base's serial ports and fax/modem card. I also got print-to-fax working, with a bit of tinkering, by mapping local serial ports onto the base machine. But I couldn't find any way to talk to the printer. If this Bluetooth implementation lets you share services, it's unclear how.
I roam my wood and plasterboard house. I can move away from the base a little better than 40 feet line-of-sight and about 26 feet between floors - but if I get too close to my ancient steel file cabinet, the connection drops.
Of course, this card is only the beginning. New Bluetooth products are being announced all over, and laptops will soon use the standard to communicate with more than just one another, as they already do via Wi-Fi. So it looks like both standards will be filling the air simultaneously. I wonder if it's too late to register PANdemonium.net.
3Com: (800) 949-3266, www.3com.com.
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