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wireless computing Wireless Productivity: Bluetooth and the Wireless InternetAndrew M. Seybold Out of the box, most Windows CE PC Companions are pretty useful devices. They synchronize with your desktop calendar, phone book, and other PIM functions when connected to your desktop. When you are away from your desk, they become an untethered extension of your desktop. You can take notes and run a variety of applications. But remotely connecting and synchronizing a PC Companion is a complicated task that needs to be made much simpler. You need to be able to check your e-mail or instant messages, retrieve information from the Internet (notice that I did not say "surf the Web"), and connect back to your desktop system from wherever you happen to be. In short, the real value of these small devices is to be able to use them in both a connected and unconnected mode and to be able to connect to your desktop when you are away from the office. During the recent COMDEX Fall and Winter Consumer Electronics Show, we saw a number of wired modems for these systems. Many of these are in the conventional PCMCIA PC Card form factor. But some of the newer wired modems are available as CompactFlash cards and will work with the PC Companions or other portable devices with CF slots. Wired LAN adapters, and even a few wireless cards are also available in PC and CF formats. Delays in developing wireless communicationOne of the reasons there are so few wireless modems is that the industry has discovered a "new" form of communications called "Bluetooth." Bluetooth is a wireless technology using the 2.4-GHz unlicensed spectrum developed by Ericsson and adopted by Intel, Nokia, Motorola, IBM, Toshiba, Compaq, and now Microsoft. Think of Bluetooth as a "wireless wire" designed to connect devices over a relatively short range (10 meters, 30 feet or less). The idea is that Bluetooth will be built into PC Companions and other PDAs, as well as cellular or PCS phones. Then we will be able to "connect" our PC Companion to our wireless phone without using a physical wire. Bluetooth is a great technology. It has been demonstrated at Wireless IT and COMDEX/Fall, at the Bluetooth developers conference, and most recently at the Winter CES in Las Vegas in January. You will see Bluetooth modules this year that are designed to plug into both PC Card and CompactFlash slots of PC Companions. You will also see Bluetooth adapters for wireless phones. Bluetooth appears to be the perfect solution for those of us who have wireless phones and want to extend our wireless capabilities beyond voice into the world of data. But there are some caveats that you need to be aware of before you plunge in and outfit yourself with Bluetooth modules for your PC Companion and your wireless phone. The first of these is that version 1.0 of Bluetooth requires a one-to-one relationship between devices. The ultimate specification will enable you to "discover" other Bluetooth devices that are in close proximity to your own and allow one or more of them to communicate with your Bluetooth device. However, in the first release you will only be able to establish a relationship between two specific Bluetooth devices. If you have a Bluetooth-enabled PC Companion and a Bluetooth-enabled wireless phone that is capable of data (many wireless networks do not support data today), you will have to be satisfied with configuring them to talk to each other exclusively. Wireless synchronization a mustBluetooth will enable you to use your wireless phone as a wireless modem for your PC Companion. From the PC Companion you will be able to command the wireless phone to make a wide-area connection to the Internet and browse the Internet using the browser on your PC Companion. This is an interesting and perhaps entertaining use, but not a compelling one for me. What I really want to be able to do is wirelessly synchronize my PC Companion with my desktop PC. Over time, many companies will offer this type of connectivity. But at the moment, most do not support PC Companions. Web synchronization solutions are currently very popular with mobile laptop PC users. It works the same whether you use Yahoo!, Visto.com, or another site. You download a small application that resides on your desktop PC. This application synchronizes the information on your desktop PIM (and in some cases files) to a Web site (the information is protected by a password). You can set the software to synchronize your desktop PIM every hour, two hours, twice a day, or whenever you want it to occur. When you are on the road you can use a laptop PC to access the PIM information stored on the Web site, without having to worry about penetrating a company firewall. I have been using Visto.com for some time now to synchronize my calendar, phone book, e-mail, to-do list, and even files. I am currently in a hotel in Dallas and have just updated my notebook with my most current calendar and additions that my administrative assistant made today to my phone book. I cannot do this with my PC Companion as I write this article. But the chances are pretty good that by the time you read it, a PC Companion solution will be available. Productivity GainsToday, if you want to be able to access information remotely and wirelessly with your PC Companion, you need to be a techno-savvy computer user. Setting up the wireless connection, accessing your own desktop or server-based information, and making it all work together is no easy task. It is certainly not an undertaking for the faint of heart. Having said this, I do believe that it is worth the effort to figure out how to make PC Companions even more valuable by extending their ability to communicate using both wired and wireless technologies. Over the next year or so, with Bluetooth products coming to market, with more wireless networks supporting data access, and with Web sites such as Visto.com, it will become easier to establish remote communications with your desktop. In the meantime, if having access to the Internet or your own information is important to you, it is still possible to put together a system that will accomplish this. But it isn't easy. The Wireless Internet You will be hearing a lot about the "Wireless Internet" in the coming months. But unless you use a Web synchronization program such as Visto.com, your personal data does not reside on the Internet. However, if you can gain access to the Internet, you can use the Internet to bridge the gap between your own data and your PC Companion. It is important to understand that connecting to the Internet is only the first step, and that the process of accessing the information you really want and need will get easier! Coming: The state of the wireless industryI have been asked to put together a "state of the wireless industry" tutorial as it relates to PC Companions. I will provide the first of a two-part series next issue. In the meantime, if you want to find out what networks will be offering wireless data access and in what time frame, visit our www.wirelessroadmap.com Web site.
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