Palm Unveils Bluetooth SD Card

Me: 'Please advise if there is a Palm OS Bluetooth SD card available for the Handera 330 PDA'.

support at Handera's reply: 'No, we are not currently developing it.'
from
Chuck McLaughlin
Technical Support
HandEra
2859 104th Street
Des Moines, IA 50322

They did not say if they intend to support anybody else card. Cananybody else throw more light on this?

http://www.palminfocenter.com/view_Story.asp?ID=1781&MODE=FLAT

$125? That's pretty pricey for a device that runs a chip that is supposed to cost $10-$12 when bought in quantity. I guess that's the price of being an early adopter.

Palm has announced a sub-$150 Bluetooth expansion card device to be available this year.
Sony has announced a sub-$150 Bluetooth expansion card device to be available this year.

Sony has also shown a clip-on Bluetooth device.
Palm has shown no other Bluetooth device.

Yet "Palm has the edge"?

You're travelling with your bluetooth cellphone on your belt and a bluetooth PDA in your pocket. Wanting to check your email, you take your PDA out, launch a mail app and tap on "check mail". The PDA automatically connects to the cellphone via bluetooth, and the cellphone then connects to the 'net. The entire process (ideally) functions transparently to you, the user.

There are many benefits to this approach over current methods:

1) PDA and cellphone manufacturers are each free to do what they do best, making smaller and more focused products rather than large hybrids (e.g. the Kyocera SmartPhone)

2) No large PDA "backpack" device is required. For the last year I had an OmniSky wireless modem for my Palm Vx, and found the service to be spotty, and disliked the hassle of yet another separate monthly bill for net access. Also, with the modem attached, my Palm was no longer super-thin, which was my primary reason for selecting it.

3) The user gains the option of leaving either the cellphone or the PDA at home, depending on their needs and available space. This is not possible with integrated devices like the Kyocera, which demands that you always carry a large device, regardless of your planned needs.

4) Additional bluetooth devices could also access, and be accessed by, your bluetooth PDA and cellphone, leveraging functionality in much broader ways. For example, imagine accessing image data from a bluetooth digital camera on your PDA, and then sending it to the net via your bluetooth cellphone. Or perhaps you'd like to add more storage than your PDA supports. No problem. Just slip a bluetooth-enabled storage unit into your pocket (possibly based on compact flash hard drives like the 1 GB IBM microdrive) and get all the storage you want, wirelessly.

5) Wireless hotsyncing. When you return home, the bluetooth module on your desktop PC could automatically detect the presence of your PDA and initiate a hotsync. Never worry about forgetting to sync again.

6) NO cables or fussy IR! While some of the applications mentioned above can be done now using wired or infrared communications, the benefits and ease-of-use of having a wireless PAN (personal area network) are obvious. Ideally, the whole thing should be as transparent as possible to the user, with devices largely self-configuring themselves as they are brought into range of the user's PAN. Cool!

7) More user choice. Instead of waiting for that single portable device that integrates all the exact features that YOU want (16-bit hires color screen, SD slot, cellular, fuzzy dice and a portable quantum field generator) just pick and choose from multiple devices from multiple vendors to assemble your own bluetooth "meta-device".

Granted, all of this depends on the industry's ability to deliver compatible, affordable and secure bluetooth products - which probably won't be the case right out of the gate - but in a year or two there's no reason why the above scenarios couldn't be an everyday reality for many of us.

Support bluetooth and encourage your favorite hardware manufacturers to do so to!

- flux

In many ways, Bluetooth is conceptually similar to 802.11 (aka Airport, wireless ethernet) which has started to become popular. Unlike 802.11, Bluetooth is a slower, has a slower adoption rate, and is not supported in the latest operating systems, such as Windows XP.

However, I think the last point is because Microsoft doesn't want to innovate on an undeveloped standard, not because 802.11 is better. 802.11 support was added because of the impressive showing of Apple's version of 802.11 (support built into every computer being manufactured for the last year) is causing companies to demand the same ease of use built into Windows. You can drive around to various parking lots in the Bay Area and log into corporate intranets pretty easily with an Airport equipped Powerbook.

On the other hand, its not a panacea. 802.11 would need to be upgraded to 802.12 in order to support switching in cell phones (and right now the movement isn't toward that integration, but into higher speeds such as 802.11a), It lacks discovery and the hardware cost is high (around $100 for a "ready" computer and $150 for one that isn't, and that's after being out for a couple of years).

So in many ways they're for different mobile markets and thus different uses. Much like the difference between building out from airport centers (wireless "ricochet" modem) vs. building along highways (cell phone). I'm curious what the "killer app" and "killer platform" of Bluetooth is going to be in a world that will be saturated with 802.11 by then.

I can't wait to get my hands on the SD Bluetooth as I just got my hands on the Ericsson T39 with GPRS, but still finding myself fiddling around with getting two devices pointing at each other on a flat surface for IR...

Ben

http://www.pdafrance.com/newspics/sdbt.jpg

(this link, from a french-palm-news-site might be usable only for some day's).