Discovering Bluetooth (Sybex).pdf

Discovering Bluetooth

Michael Miller

Associate Publisher:

Richard J. Staron

Contracts and Licensing Manager:

Kristine O’Callaghan

Acquisitions and Developmental Editor:

Chris Denny

Editor:

Suzanne Goraj

Production Editor:

Kylie Johnston

Technical Editor:

André Paree-Huff

Book Designer:

Maureen Forys, Happenstance Type-O-Rama

Graphic Illustrator:

Jeff Wilson

Electronic Publishing Specialist:

Maureen Forys, Happenstance Type-O-Rama

Proofreaders:

Nanette Duffy, Leslie E.H. Light, Nancy Riddiough

Indexer:

Lynnzee Elze

Cover Designer:

Richard Miller, Calyx Design

Cover Illustrator/Photographer:

Richard Miller, Calyx Design

rights reserved. No part of this publication may be stored in a retrieval system, transmitted, or

reproduced in any way, including but not limited to photocopy, photograph, magnetic, or

other record, without the prior agreement and written permission of the publisher.

Library of Congress Card Number: 2001089823

ISBN: 0-7821-2972-2

SYBEX and the SYBEX logo are trademarks of SYBEX Inc. in the USA and other countries.

TRADEMARKS: SYBEX has attempted throughout this book to distinguish proprietary

trademarks from descriptive terms by following the capitalization style used by the

manufacturer.

The author and publisher have made their best efforts to prepare this book, and the content is

based upon final release software whenever possible. Portions of the manuscript may be based

upon pre-release versions supplied by software manufacturer(s). The author and the publisher

make no representation or warranties of any kind with regard to the completeness or accuracy

of the contents herein and accept no liability of any kind including but not limited to

performance, merchantability, fitness for any particular purpose, or any losses or damages of

any kind caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly from this book.

Manufactured in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

To Dennis and Melanie Hauser (and Ben and Alec), for providing cheap accommodations

whenever I visit Chicagoland—oh, and for being good family, too.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to everyone on the Sybex team who has shaped and shepherded this project, including

but not limited to Chris Denny, Suzanne Goraj, Kylie Johnston, André Paree-Huff, Dick

Staron, and my old friend Jordan Gold. Thanks also to Suzanne Crow of Siemens, Dave Curl

of TDK Systems, Anna Dimert of Ericsson, Tania Sawa-Priatka and John Simonds of IBM,

and Spencer Ward of Coltrin & Associates (for 3Com) for their assistance in providing

information and product photographs for this book. Special thanks to Ron Sperano of IBM

and Jeremiah Zinn of Ericsson for taking time from their busy schedules to provide the

interviews in Chapter 4 —interesting stuff, guys!

About the Author

Michael Miller is the author of more than three dozen best-selling technology-oriented

reference books. You can contact him directly at bluetooth@molehillgroup.com .

Introduction

Everyone is always looking for the “next big thing”—especially in the world of technology.

Emerging technologies attract interest because of their future application (how will it affect

my life?), because of their potential investment value (it’s good to get in on the ground floor

of something big), and, quite frankly, because they’re kind of cool.

Bluetooth is just such an emerging technology. Many—including me—think that it’s going to

be the “next big thing” in the computing and telecommunications worlds.

If you follow the technology news, you’ve probably heard about Bluetooth already. It’s a new

wireless technology that promises not just to eliminate the cables that connect our computing

and electronics equipment, but also to spawn new and exciting applications for electronic

information exchange, electronic payments, and who knows what else.

And, if it does half of what some people predict, it’s going to be big.

It’s that future potential that inspired me to write this book. The technology is interesting, yes,

but Bluetooth also has the potential to dramatically affect the way we do many things in our

everyday lives. It’s quite possible, once the technology hits a critical mass, that we’ll find

Bluetooth driving literally dozens of our different activities each day. When we use our

computers or PDAs, we’ll be using Bluetooth technology. When we use our desktop or

mobile phones, we’ll be using Bluetooth. When we drive our cars, Bluetooth will be along for

the ride. When we go shopping, or traveling, or out for a night on the town, Bluetooth will be

there.

If you’re at all like me (and millions of other technology enthusiasts), you want to be in on the

Bluetooth revolution from the very beginning. Maybe you’re the guy who has to be the first

on his block with all the new toys and gadgets. Maybe you see how Bluetooth can provide a

better way to do those tasks that are slow and cumbersome today. Maybe you see an

investment opportunity, and want to know which companies will benefit from a Bluetooth

boom. Maybe you work for a company that is considering adding Bluetooth functionality to

its products. Maybe you just want to find out what all the fuss is about.

Whichever of these statements best describes your interest in Bluetooth, you’ve come to the

right place. Discovering Bluetooth is the first book to examine Bluetooth from a consumer,

rather than a technical, perspective. This book will tell you what Bluetooth is about, how it

works (in general terms—not a lot of technobabble here), and how it’s likely to impact your

daily life. You’ll learn the history of Bluetooth (it came from Sweden...), view some of the

first Bluetooth products to hit the market, and discover all sorts of interesting potential

applications of the technology.

In short, whatever your interest in Bluetooth, you’ll find the information you seek within

these pages.

To make it easier to find precisely what you’re interested in, Discovering Bluetooth is divided

into three major sections, as follows:

• Part I , Discovering Bluetooth , contains three chapters that provide the essential

background and history of the Bluetooth technology and of the consortium of

companies that are developing Bluetooth for consumer consumption.

• Part II , What Bluetooth Does , contains two chapters that describe a number of

practical applications of the Bluetooth technology, as well as present a multitude of

first-generation Bluetooth-enabled products that are either currently available or will

be available soon.

• Part III , How Bluetooth Works , contains six chapters that present the technical

background behind the technology, discuss potential competitors to Bluetooth and

barriers to its success, and predict how Bluetooth will develop in the future.

If you get stumped anywhere in the text, you can turn to the useful reference information

contained in this book’s appendixes and glossary. Here you can find a list of Bluetooth-related

acronyms (and this technology is very acronym heavy!), a glossary of Bluetooth-related

terms, the basic technical specifications behind the technology, and a helpful list of other

Bluetooth resources that you might want to check out.

I think Bluetooth is going to be a big thing; that’s why I wrote this book. I hope that

Discovering Bluetooth provides the information you need to make up your own mind about

Bluetooth—and to whet your appetite for this exciting new technology!

Part I: Discovering Bluetooth

In This Part

Chapter 1: Introducing Bluetooth

Chapter 2: How Bluetooth Came to Be

Chapter 3: The Bluetooth Industry

Chapter 1: Introducing Bluetooth

There’s a Bluetooth in your future. No, this isn’t the kind of blue tooth that requires expensive

dental whitening. This Bluetooth is a technology that promises to eliminate most of the cables

that connect your various personal computing devices—and to create new types of smart

wireless communications.

This book is your guide to Bluetooth, a consumer-level overview of the technology and its

possible applications. Throughout the rest of this book you’ll learn all sorts of details about

Bluetooth—what it is, what it does, how it does it, and how you’ll use it. Before we get to

those details, however, this chapter provides you with a general overview of the Bluetooth

technology. So even if you’ve never heard of Bluetooth before, you’ll find out what all the

fuss is about—and discover how and why you’ll soon be using Bluetooth technology in your

daily life.

Visions of a Wireless World

The computing, communications, and consumer electronics industries have introduced many

benefits to today’s consumers. Of course, they’ve also introduced many headaches, not the

least of which is the necessity of connecting all these devices to each other, usually with a

phalanx of cables and wires that are both annoyingly messy and mind-numbingly confusing.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could connect your printer to your PC—or your PC to your PDA

or your PDA to your phone line—without fumbling with the necessary cabling and worrying

about whether you’re using the right type of connector?

If you’d like to nix all that messy cabling, Bluetooth is for you. Bluetooth technology enables

wireless connections between any number of computing, communications, and consumer

electronics devices—and promises much more than that, including “smart” device recognition

and synchronization.

At its most basic, Bluetooth technology will usher in a world of wireless connections. Using

short-range radio wave transmissions, Bluetooth technology will enable all your different

electronic devices to connect to each other— without wires .

Cableless Computing

Consider the common chore of hooking up a printer to your personal computer. Today you

have to buy a big, thick, ungainly cable with multi-pin connectors on either end, plug the

cable into the proper ports on the back of both your PC and your printer, and go through a

complex setup procedure to make sure your PC recognizes the printer. Even when everything

goes right—and it often doesn’t!—the process is a pain in the rear, especially if you want to

put your printer in a place that is either awkward to get to or far enough away from your PC

that the standard cables won’t quite reach.

Now imagine that same task in a Bluetooth-enabled world. In this world, your printer sends

and receives data to and from your PC via a wireless connection, so you don’t have to mess

with that bulky computer cable. That means that you can place your printer anywhere you

want—even clear across the room!—because you’re not limited by the constraints imposed by

cable connections. Plus, since Bluetooth is a technology that automatically recognizes all

active devices in the vicinity, the process of configuring your computer for your specific

printer will become much easier—in many cases, totally automatic.

If the thought of hooking up your printer without a cable sounds appealing, think of all the

other devices you currently have plugged into your PC. If you’re like many computer users,

you have at least a half-dozen different items wired to your system unit, including your

keyboard, mouse, joystick, speakers (two or more, most likely), microphone, personal digital

assistant, scanner, digital still camera, PC/Web camera, video camera, and, of course, your

printer. In addition, you can’t forget the connection between your PC’s modem and the

nearest phone jack, nor the network connection that is required of any PC connected to a local

area network. Today, every one of these connections is made with a cable; with Bluetooth

technology, almost all of these connections can be wireless.

Think of how cluttered the back of your computer (and the back of your desk!) looks today,

and then try to envision the same setup, but without cables. That is how things will look when

Bluetooth technology invades your desktop.

Automatic Synchronization

Bluetooth is more than just a cable-replacement technology, however. It’s also a technology

that enables any electronic device to communicate with any other electronic device,

automatically. This means that, over short distances (30 feet or so), your cell phone or

personal digital assistant (PDA) can connect to, synchronize with, and even control the other

electronic devices in your home or office—such as your personal computer, printer, television

set, home alarm system, or home/office telephone system. All of this communication can take

place in an ad hoc fashion, without your being aware, totally automatically.

Consider this scenario. You have a PDA that contains your contact list and daily schedule.

You need to synchronize the data on your PDA with similar data on your desktop computer.

Today, you do this by connecting your PDA to your computer, typically via a serial cable.

(Another cable!) Once the proper connections are made, you have to manually synchronize

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