What Is Bluetooth?
| Bluetooth is a wireless communication standard geared toward removing the wires between computers and their peripherals. For example, you can purchase a Bluetooth keyboard, mouse, and printer to eliminate the wires that typically connect these peripherals to your desktop or notebook PC. Similarly, Bluetooth has become popular in the mobile realm for using a mobile headset or hands-free car kit to communicate with a mobile phone. This is the most common application of Bluetooth to Treo devices. Bluetooth effectively enables you to operate a wireless network limited to a very small area (usually up to 10 meters, or 32 feet). For a Treo device using Bluetooth, the "network" consists of your Treo and a Bluetooth headset, hands-free car kit, or GPS receiver, to name a few examples. Bluetooth devices communicate over a 2.45 gigahertz (GHz) radio connection, similar to the one used by baby monitors, garage door openers, and cordless phones. For this reason, interference is technically possible if you operate a Bluetooth headset with your Treo in the same area as other wireless equipment. However, the specific design of the Bluetooth communication protocol helps alleviate the problem. The Bluetooth specification defines three different classes of devices, each of which offers a varying level of wireless signal strength and, therefore, a different operating distance (see Table 11.1).
Your Treo device is a Class 2 Bluetooth device, so you can expect a Bluetooth headset to give you a range of around 10 meters, or 32 feet. This is assuming, of course, that the headset is also a Class 2 device. If it's a Class 3 device, you can expect a reduced range. Keep in mind that I'm talking about the distance between your Treo and the Bluetooth headsetgenerally speaking, you'll likely keep the two devices in close proximity to one another, so the 10-meter limit is unlikely to present a serious problem. Note The name Bluetooth is derived from Harald Bluetooth, who was king of Denmark in the late 900s (that's correct, the tenth century). Along with simply serving as an unusual and unique name, Bluetooth is named after the Danish king because King Bluetooth is known for unifying the previously warring tribes of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. Bluetooth is considered somewhat of a unifying technology between devices that otherwise have no means of communicating with each other wirelessly. Every Bluetooth device is responsible for supporting one or more profiles, which describe the Bluetooth applications available for use with the device. Following are some examples of Bluetooth profiles:
The Treo 650 supports the first four profiles, which together allow you to connect your device to headsets (Headset Profile), hands-free car kits (Hands-Free Profile), other devices via a wireless serial connection (Serial Port Profile), and other devices for sharing discrete pieces of data, such as contacts (General Object Exchange Profile). Note You might have seen the Universal Wireless Keyboard that Palm offers for use with many of its devices. Although wireless Bluetooth keyboards exist, Palm's Universal Wireless Keyboard uses an infrared connection to Palm devices, not a Bluetooth connection. A popular Bluetooth wireless keyboard for Treo devices is the Stowaway Bluetooth Keyboard by Think Outside. This keyboard is available from the palmOne online store at http://web.palmone.com/products/Category.jhtml?ID=20022. Another other important topic worth covering is the version of Bluetooth supported in Treo devices. As you shop for Bluetooth headsets and hands-free car kits, you might run across a version number for their Bluetooth support. Although Bluetooth is currently up to version 2.0, the majority of Bluetooth accessories currently available are designed for Bluetooth version 1.1. Treo devices are designed around Bluetooth 1.1, so you have a wide range of Bluetooth headsets and hands-free devices from which to choose. Newer versions of Bluetooth include version 1.2 and version 2.0, both of which are backward-compatible with version 1.1. So you shouldn't encounter any compatibility problems when it comes to buying headsets and hands-free devices for your Treo. Note Several Bluetooth printers are on the market that you can use with your Treo, such as the Canon i80. With a Bluetooth printer, you can wirelessly print pictures, tasks, memos, business cards, and schedules from your Treo. Even if your printer doesn't include built-in Bluetooth support, you can easily turn it into a Bluetooth printer by using a Bluetooth printer adapter, such as the HP BT1300 or Bluetake BT210; these adapters plug into the printer's USB or parallel port. I want to close this Bluetooth primer by tackling a common source of confusion associated with Bluetooth: how it differs from the popular Wi-Fi (802.11a/b/g) wireless networking technologies. First, Bluetooth and Wi-Fi are not competing technologies; they are designed to solve uniquely different problems. The fundamental goal of both technologies is to eliminate wires between devices, but the scope of the wires they are intended to eliminate differs. Bluetooth focuses on low-power short-range connections between devices, such as the connection between a mouse and a PC. Wi-Fi addresses network connections between computer systems, such as the Ethernet cable between a computer and a router. To some degree, each technology overlaps the other from time to time. As an example, both Wi-Fi and Bluetooth adapters are available for wireless printing and can both be used for wireless synchronization. To help understand the relationship between Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, think of Bluetooth as the wireless equivalent of USB and Wi-Fi as the wireless equivalent of Ethernet. This is not an exact analogy, but from a general perspective, it's reasonably accurate. |
