Bluetooth will create a lifestyle without wires

Bluetooth may may conjure up images of a particularly cold dental surgery, but it is set to revolutionise the electronics and computer industry again, and will change your lifestyle forever.
If you are fed up with the bundles of cables that connect all your electrical and computer appliances - the ones that tangle round your legs and knock over your coffee cups - well, Bluetooth will replace them.
Instead of communicating by wire, computers, mobile phones and any other Bluetooth-enabled device will be able to talk to each other via radiowaves.
The technology - named after a tenth-century Danish king whose communication skills linked Norway and Denmark as one kingdom - was developed by a special interest group formed by leading computer, electronics and mobile phone companies in a bid to create a wireless world.
"It won't be long before you will be able to log onto the Internet when you are about to leave your office and tell your home computer to switch on the microwave, open the electronic garage door and programme the video to record your favourite programme," said Michael Mahler of IBM, a company exhibiting the technology at Gitex 2000.
"At the moment the technology is there for one laptop to talk to others or a mobile phone over a distance of 10 metres and this range will be increased in time." The data transfer between any two devices is encrypted and runs at a high speed of 724 kilobytes per second using low-powered radio signals.
R. Muralidharan, general manager of Al Futtaim Electronics, local representative of fellow pioneer Toshiba, said the technology will also make a great impact on the office, training and educational environments.
"If you are giving a presentation, you can have what is shown on your computer screen displayed on others in the room at the same time without the need for any wires.
"At the moment a portable computer is not really portable. When you want to communicate you need to attach wires to it, but Bluetooth eliminates that."
He said the technology now allows only eight computers to be linked at once, but that is also likely to increase in time.
"I believe it will ultimately allow a home to be completely networked without the use of wires," he said. Acer, Toshiba and IBM have all been demonstrating their Bluetooth technology at Gitex 2000, which takes the form of cards which slot into notebook computers.