Other Bluetooth Devices

Other Bluetooth Devices
Cell phone and PDAs aren’t the only devices that can use Bluetooth, of
course. In fact, the value of Bluetooth would be considerably lessened if they
were. It’s the network effect — the value (to the user) of a networked device
that increases exponentially as the number of networked devices increases.
To use a common analogy, think about fax machines (if you can remember
them . . . we hardly ever use ours any more). The first guy with a fax machine
found it pretty useless, at least until the second person got hers. As more and
more folks got faxes, the fax machine became more useful to each one of
them because they simply had a lot more people to send faxes to (or receive
them from).
Bluetooth is the same way. Just connecting your PDA to your cell phone is kind
of cool, in a geek-chic kinda way, but it’s not going to set the world on its ear.
But when you start considering wireless headsets, printers, PCs, keyboards,
and even Global Positioning System (GPS) receivers — if you’re a surveyor,
check out Trimble’s (www.trimble.com) GPS receivers with BlueCap technology
— and the value of Bluetooth becomes much clearer.
In this section of the chapter, we discuss some of these other Bluetooth
devices.