Wireless Home Networking - Index of

ox pops up on your screen through which you can do your thing. Pairing
Bluetooth devices is usually easy. In some cases (such as syncing mobile
phone address books with your PC), you need to finesse some software on
one side or the other. With a Bluetooth headset for your cell phone, for
example, you tell your phone to find the device. Then you enter a four-digit
code into your phone so it knows to talk to only that headset and the headset
knows it’s dedicated to only that phone. Although we find that pairing
Bluetooth is pretty simple, it’s always wise to consult the owner’s manual
and the Web sites of the software and hardware companies involved.
Check out the section “Understanding Pairing and Discovery,” at the end of
this chapter, for more details on making Bluetooth connections.
Other Bluetooth Devices
Cell phones and PDAs aren’t the only devices that can use Bluetooth. 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
simply because they had many more people to send faxes to (or receive
them from).
Bluetooth is the same. Just connecting your PDA to your cell phone is kind
of cool, in a geek-chic kinda way, but it doesn’t set the world on its ear. But
when you start considering wireless headsets, printers, PCs, keyboards,
and even global positioning system (GPS) receivers — check out Telenav
(www.telenav.com) GPS navigation software and receivers from GlobalSat
(www.globalsat.com) — the value of Bluetooth becomes much clearer. In
this section, we discuss some of these other Bluetooth devices.
Printers
We talk about connecting printers to your wireless LAN in Chapter 10, but
what if you want to access your printer from all the portable devices that
don’t have wireless LAN connections built into them? Or, if you don’t have
your printer connected to the wireless LAN, what do you do when you want
to quickly print a document that’s on your laptop? Well, why not use
Bluetooth?
You can get Bluetooth onto your printer in two ways:
Chapter 15: Using a Bluetooth Network
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