TECH TO GO

Bluetooth products announced
for summer 2001

By Andy Walker, Cyberwalker Media Syndicate

Fear not gadget fiends, Bluetooth is here. I did a survey of technology manufacturers and asked them for ship dates for their Bluetooth gadgets.

Plantronics M1000 Bluetooth headset

Bluetooth phones: Ericsson r520 and t68

Motorola's Bluetooth phone, the Timeport 270c

Hewlett Packard's 995c Bluetooth printer

The response was surprising. Bluetooth is here and it's real.

For those who are new to the concept, Bluetooth is a chip technology that replaces cables with a wireless connection that can share data at up to speeds of up to about 730 kilobits per second. That's faster than the real world speed of information from the Internet on high-speed wired modems.

That means a handheld computer with Bluetooth can talk to a Bluetooth enabled cellular phone or printer or even a personal computer, just by coming within 30 feet of it. Any Bluetooth devices can communicate with any other Bluetooth device.

There has been a lot of hype about the technology since it was conceived by Ericsson in 1997 and incubated by the company along with Bluetooth partners IBM, Intel, Nokia and Toshiba.

What's taken so long? "There are a lot of partners in the SIG (Bluetooth Special Interest Group) trying to find a standard that wireless devices and peripherals can seamlessly exist under…but it was a big undertaking to get everyone to talk the same language," said Michael McAvoy, category business manager for consumer inkjet printing at Hewlett Packard Canada.

The Bluetooth 1.0 standard developed by the SIG had a false start. There were interoperability problems between devices. But the 1.1 specification has since been released and everyone is hurriedly building their product around it.

Here's a rundown of what products are in the chute. Some are available now, some this summer and others into the fall.

Plantronics, maker of phone headsets, has announced the M1000 will ship this September. It's a Bluetooth headset that works with both a cellular phone and your office phone. The device will come in two versions. The first will simply provide an integrated wireless headset with boom microphone that will communicate with a Bluetooth cellular phone. So you can keep your phone in your pocket or purse and receive calls by touching a button at your ear. A second headset kit comes with an adapter for a wireline phone in the home or office. When the headset comes into range of the wired phone you can take calls on it. When you're out and about, the cellular phone is the device you make calls through. It costs $199 US (about $300 Canadian). The headset and adapter will cost about $300 US ($450 Canadian).

Hewlett Packard is launching its first Bluetooth printer, called the DeskJet 995c. The printer is a Bluetooth version of the DeskJet 900 series, the company's top consumer inkjet product line. Besides a built-in Bluetooth chip, the peripheral will also have parallel port and USB connectors. The 995c prints at 17 pages per minute in monochrome and 13 ppm in colour. When using a Bluetooth connection, it prints at 13 ppm monochrome and 12 ppm in colour.
It will be launched in the early fall. "Fall starts Sept 22, so later September, early October," said McAvoy. It hasn't been priced, but he said the Bluetooth technology will cause a premium pricing on the top-end DeskJet 990cse, which is priced at $400 US / $599 Canadian.

An add-on device that will give the existing 900 series printers Bluetooth functionality will also be launched mid-summer.

Hewlett Packard will also bundle 3Com's Bluetooth PC Card with the HP Omnibook 6000 and HP Pavilion notebooks in July for $185 US / $265 Canadian. The card will be available on its own later this month through 3Com vendors. 3Com has listed it at $150 US / $225 Canadian.

In the cellular phone world, both Ericsson and Motorola have announced Bluetooth products. Meanwhile, Nokia won't ship any Bluetooth products until early in 2002.

The Timeport 270c is Motorola's first Bluetooth-capable phone which when combined with a Bluetooth Smart Module accessory and Bluetooth PC card will give the phone a wireless connection to a notebook computer.

The phone is designed for a CDMA network, which is the cellular technology used by Telus Mobility and Bell Mobility in Canada and Sprint PCS and Verizon Wireless in the U.S.

The products will be launched in late August or early September. "It's hard to nail down 100 per cent because it's dependent on the carrier," said Steve Orr, director of sales for Motorola PCS.
The phone's back panel can be snapped off and replaced with a Bluetooth panel that is about 2 mm thicker than the regular panel. It will be sold as a kit which will include the Bluetooth panel as well as a Bluetooth PC Card. A Bluetooth headset will also be available. Pricing is hard to predict as the cellular phone carriers dictate prices based on the service plan the phone is sold with. However, ballpark estimates put the base pricing for the phone at about $200 US to $270 US / $300 to $400 Canadian. The carriers will likely opt to bundle a kit at $525-$575US / $700 to $800 Canadian.

Ericsson is shipping the R520 Bluetooth cellular phone in Europe today. It will be available for about $400 to $500 US ($600 to $750 Canadian) in North America this fall once high speed data over cellular networks is established. This summer Rogers AT&T, which sells Ericsson handsets in Canada, will deploy their GPRS network. It will provide always-on cellular data connections at speeds of up to 144 kbps. Similar rollouts in the U.S. are expected in the fall.

Ericsson will also launch the Bluetooth-ready T39 and the colour T68 phones and a Bluetooth headset. The Ericsson T39 will be available by October in Europe and shortly thereafter in North America. The T68 will be available before the end of 2001. The $265 US ($400 Canadian) headset is available today. Pricing has yet to be set.

Ericsson is also introducing the Cordless Web Screen H610 by year end. It's a Bluetooth-enabled home Internet appliance that provides wireless Web and e-mail access. The Linux-based device also has a touch-sensitive colour screen and speakerphone. It will be priced around US$700 / $1050 Canadian.

Then there's Ericsson's BLIP, a Bluetooth information access point for corporate and public wireless access. The US$499 / $750 Canadian device will be used to give people information and Internet access wirelessly. Shopping malls could use it to broadcast sales or coupons to handheld devices or cell phones. Airports could provide wireless Internet access to passengers through it. It's available today.

Ericsson is also gambling on a Web radio. Like the failed 3Com Kerbango, the Internet Radio H100 is a device that accesses radio stations via an Internet connection. The device uses Bluetooth to connect to a fast home Internet connection making it wireless within 100 feet of an access point.

It also features an alarm clock that can wake its owner with a buzzer, by turning on a radio station or with a computer sound file. It can also connect to a broadband modem using a regular network cable. It has yet to be priced and will be available by year-end.

Palm has announced a Bluetooth Card for its m500 and m505 handheld computers. The postage stamp-sized card fits into the devices' Secure Digital/MultiMediaCard expansion slot. It was jointly developed between Palm and Toshiba and will cost $150 US / $225 Canadian. It will give the Palm access to a cellphone's Internet connection or allow the device to synchronize data wirelessly with other devices including a computer. It will be available by the end of the year.

Compaq is shipping a product called the MultiPort which snaps onto the Compaq Evo N400C notebook PC, a Pentium III, 700 MHz portable computer. The device has both Bluetooth and 802.11b technology built into it so that it can connect with either a wireless local area network or with any other Bluetooth device. The notebook is priced at $2400 US / $3599 Canadian and is available end of this month. The MultiPort option will cost $200 US / $309. The ship date is still being determined.

IBM has meanwhile announced two products. Its Bluetooth PC Card for notebooks costs $175 US / $249 Canadian and is available now.

Coming by end of summer is the IBM Bluetooth UltraPort. UltraPorts are little USB gadgets that snap onto screens of IBM Thinkpad notebook PCs. They include speakers, a camera and microphone. The Bluetooth Ultraport module, which has yet to be priced, will ship by summer's end.