Wireless Home Networking - Index of

Bluetooth Mobile Phones
Chapter 15: Using a Bluetooth Network
The first place where Bluetooth technology is taking off is in the cell phone
world. This statement probably shouldn’t be a surprise because Sony
Ericsson, a huge cell phone maker, was the initial proponent of the technology,
and other huge cell phone companies, such as Nokia, are also proponents.
Today just about every new phone being announced (except for the cheap-o
ones) included Bluetooth technology. Sony Ericsson, Nokia, Motorola,
Samsung, and Siemens, among others, are all selling Bluetooth-enabled
phones. The adoption of the technology has been spectacular. A few years
ago, Bluetooth was a rarity; now it’s a standard.
You can do many things with Bluetooth in a cell phone, but the five most
common applications are
� Eliminate cables: Many people use headsets with their cell phones. It’s
much easier to hear with an earpiece in your ear than it is to hold one of
today’s miniscule cell phones up to your ear — and much more convenient.
The wire running up your torso, around your arm, and along the
side of your head into your ear is a real pain, though. (Some people go
to great lengths to keep from being tangled up in this wire — check out
the jackets at www.scottevest.com.) A better solution is to connect
your headset wirelessly — using Bluetooth, of course. Literally dozens
of Bluetooth headsets are on the market, from specialized headset
manufacturers such as Plantronics (www.plantronics.com) and Jabra
(www.jabra.com), as well as from the cell phone manufacturers
themselves.
� Synchronize phone books: Lots of us keep a phone book on our PC
or PDA — and most of us who do have been utterly frustrated by the
difficulty we face when we try to get these phone books onto our cell
phones. If you can do it at all, you end up buying some special cable and
software and then you still have to manually correct some of the entries.
But with Bluetooth on your cell phone and PC or PDA, the process can
be automatic.
� Get pictures off your camera phone: Many new cell phones are camera
phones with a built-in digital camera. The cell phone companies promote
this concept because they can charge customers for multimedia
messaging services (MMS) and allow people to send pictures to other
cell phone customers. But if your PC has Bluetooth capabilities, you can
use Bluetooth to send the picture you just snapped to your PC’s hard
drive (or even use Bluetooth to transfer the file directly to a buddy’s cell
phone when he or she is within range — for free!).
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