Apple Archive

A Better Portable Solution: Bluetooth Instead of Wires

- 2004.05.10

Most computer users leave their peripherals at their desk. They don't take their speakers, iPod dock, PDA cradle, memory card reader, and whatever other peripherals they've got along with them when they leave the desk.

If you've got a laptop, that collection of peripherals usually sits there on your desk, disconnected, doing nothing, and looking pretty ridiculous with cables all over the place.

What if you need to connect your PDA while you're using your laptop out in the field? You're out of luck, unless you've thought to bring the cradle or cable needed to connect it to your laptop.

The simple solution is to bring all of those peripherals with you, but then you've got to have a computer bag bigger than Russia to hold all the things you might need.

And then there are all the cables that you've got to deal with. It's not just a power adapter for the computer anymore, but ethernet cables, printer cables, power cables for other devices, USB cables for digital camera, FireWire cables - the list seems endless. Furthermore, cables often get tangled together in your computer bag. Anyone who has had to do it knows that untangling cables isn't exactly fun.

There are also the "interesting looks" that you get when you want to transfer a Cure album from your computer to your iPod. Out come the long FireWire cable and the iPod, presuming you can find both in your bag of cables. People watch you curiously as you spend 10 minutes looking for the cable, just 2 minutes actually transferring the album, and another 5 minutes rewrapping the cable and putting it back in your bag (not like it stays wrapped anyway).

What can eliminate printer, PDA, MP3 player, and digital camera cables? Perhaps Bluetooth will. Since many high-end PDAs, mobile phones, and printers already have the Bluetooth capability, all you have to do is put the device near you Bluetooth-equipped computer . . . and it works.

What could be better than that?

Unfortunately, most of the devices in use aren't Bluetooth-equipped, and Apple laptops made before 2002 are not Bluetooth-enabled. You can buy a USB Bluetooth adapter for older Macs with USB ports, but PDAs and MP3 players must have it built in.

My old Handspring PDA definitely doesn't have it, and unless you've got one of the newer, color screen models, yours probably doesn't have Bluetooth either.

Right now I'm sitting at my desk in front of my blue G3. It's got my scanner, stereo speakers, PDA cradle, digital camera cable, printer, and FireWire cable (for the iPod) connected to it. Things work well, but take a look down on the floor behind the machine and you'll see a mess of wires. If my desk wasn't positioned in the middle of the room, I could hide these unsightly wires behind the computer. Unfortunately, that can't be done in this situation.

Whether Bluetooth will catch on and gain popularity remains to be seen. It certainly has the potential to replace many forms of wired communication between devices, but until it replaces all of them we'll still have a few cables to carry around in our laptop bags.

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