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First Bluetooth Wireless Notebook at CeBIT 49

Posted by CmdrTaco from the sign-me-up-for-that dept.
Hasdi Hashim writes, "NEC Corporation is using the first generation National Semiconductor chipset in the world's first Bluetooth interoperable notebook PCs with a built-in antenna, displayed at CeBit 2000."
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First Bluetooth Wireless Notebook at CeBIT More

First Bluetooth Wireless Notebook at CeBIT

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  • low cost wireless how-to (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    There is a how-to here [qsl.net] that might be useful for increasing the range of 2.4 GHz wireless devices, such as Bluetooth.

  • Re:Very cool (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    The whole bandwidth statement is not exactly true. The reason you can only communicate at 9600 baud with a 900MHz cellphone is because that is all bandwidth you get on the given traffic channel on the given time slot (defined by GSM, or TAI-EIA for 800MHz). It has nothing to do with the 900MHz range. Soon GPRS will be coming out that will be tieing together time slots giving you a bandwidth about 100k. One possible problem with the 2.4GHz band is that is about the same freq as microwave ovens. I can't remeber the bandwidth for BlueTooth, but I seem to remember it is somewhere around 1MBits/sec (but don't quote me.) Bluetooth is more a Wireless LAN application (short range communication). I don't remember the actual distances, but I beleive it is around 1000ft. On the plus side 2.4GHz goes through walls really well.

  • Re:Exciting Technology, Good Marketing (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Last I heard, the Bluetooth specs didn't have a good way to turn off the Bluetooth features. This is a problem when you have a lot of Bluetooth-enabled devices (laptop, PDA, watch, pager, cell phone, etc.) on an airplane, where the devices could, in some cases, conceivably interfere with some of the aircraft's instruments.

    I'm sure you can guess the implications of this ....

    I've also heard rumors that the FAA might ban all Bluetooth-enabled devices from aircraft (once these devices become available, that is).

  • Info.. (Score:1)

    by i ( 8254 )
    You can look at their homesite http://www.bluetooth.com or at http://www.bluetooth.com/developer/specification/s pecification.asp to get the specs.

    One limitation of Bluetooth is that it reaches only something around 100 meters if I remember.
    So You can say that it's a kind of "local connection" protocoll and hardware.

    But with the predicted prices You could use it in keyboards, mouses, phones(local), PDAs, remotes a s o...

    Thomas Berg
  • Either I'm confused (likely), or we're not exactly talking about the same thing (more likely).

    To me, bandwidth is the bit carrying capacity, measured in bps. After looking up Nyquist's and Shannon's formulas, and reading up on the correct terminology, I'm going to plant my foot firmly in my mouth.

    By George! Bandwidth in EE land is a frequency range. So I stand corrected, a slice of the spectrum, regardless of position, has a constant bandwidth; meaning the difference between the top freq and bottom freq of the slice. Duh!

    Would you accept that the bit rate of a bandwidth in a higher frequency range is greater than the bit rate of that same bandwidth in a lower frequency range? Does that even make sense? Or do I need to consider the properties of the medium as well?

    For what it's worth, here's the reference [whatis.com] that started my digging.
  • It does matter where you allocate the bandwidth in that the higher the frequency, the higher the bandwidth that it can carry. So, for a set bandwidth, you need a tighther band in the higher freq than in the lower one.

    Unfortunately, this is entirely incorrect. A given amount of bandwidth will be able to carry exactly the same amount of information (or bits per second) regardless of its location in the frequency spectrum. For example, 100 MHz of bandwidth will carry the same amount of information if it is located from 500-600 MHz or from 6000 to 6100 MHz. The information carrying capacity depends only on the bandwidth used and the modulation technique.

    I think some guy named Shannon had a thing or two to say about this.
  • very nice, the tech is cheap (US$5.60ea@1000/batch.) and the 2.4Ghz band gives you good speed on the wireless. beats the hell out of the 900Mhz range that my cel phone hooked to my laptop runs. (for those who aren't familar with radio tech, a simple version is more Hz = faster data sent, since the wavelengths of the band are shorter, and radio waves travel at the same speed regardless of wavelength.) the only thing i see that could be a prob is range. will i be able to do a wireless network from my laptop to my server at home, and still be able to roam around the city while at work? or will this be more of a wireless LAN application?
  • The Bluetooth specs. allow for overlapping piconets, but none of the products being hyped/introduced right now (as far as I know) actually *do* that. In fact I thought inter-piconet communication was taken out of the feature list for the first generation of Bluetooth. The real problem with BT will be when there are a ton of these things around, because the emphasis on "invisible connectivity" means that most of the devices won't have user interfaces to control network issues - ie everyone in your office has 2-3 BT devices and suddenly you can't get your PDA and your laptop in the same piconet so they won't sync.
  • I understand now! Thanks stain ain, jabber, bonzo, ralph and dattaway. Building on what you said Ralph. If they make the "cells" very small and the transmit power low, they can use all the bandwidth of that frequency on a small number of users, thereby keeping the enduser bandwidth at a relatively high percentage of the total bandwidth of that frequency (or is it a band of frequencies?).

    All in all, a pretty slick system. Thanks guys.
  • (I was just sooooo eager to get a first post) If all of my current devices (PDA and Cell Phone) have IrDA ports, then how does this help me at all? There is no mention in the press release if the Notebook PC will even support IrDA. Also, wasn't there supposed to be a problem with the FAA and Bluetooth? I thought they said that instead of just takeoff and landing, bluetooth-enabled notebooks would have to remain off for the duration of the flight, just like cell phones.

    Does anyone know where I can find real (non-National Semiconductor) information?

  • AKA (Score:1)

    by kwsNI ( 133721 )
    the world's first Bluetooth interoperable notebook PCs with a built-in antenna

    Also know as a laptop.

    kwsNI

  • Bluetooth is a short range technology - on the order of 10m with 1 mW of power. This is referred to as a personal area network. There is a higher power option (100 mW), but not with $5 parts. Data rate is 720 kbps according the to the Bluetooth website. It has integral voice capabilities in the standard.

    11 Mbps 802.11 (also at 2.4 GHz) has range to about 150 feet in an office/home environment, or about a kilometer outdoors in line-of-sight. Of course, no 802.11 radios that I am aware of cost 5 bucks, either.

  • Has anyone actually checked the specs on this thing? Well...

    1) It is actually designed for appliance type devices, not to build networks.
    2) The bandwidth is shared between all the devices , but most importantly...
    3) MAX of only 8 devices.

    that might sound like enough, but consider this senerio: I got an ericson cell phone and wireless head set(bluetooth), and synching my organizer with my laptop which is trying to connect to the internet through a bluetooth access port. I think that might be a plausible senario, until someone with just as much stuff sits down next to me.
  • Think of a very long ruler with all the marks in centimetres on it. The spectrum is the same, only that the marks are given in a frequency unit, MHz.
    In any communication system you need some bandwith allocated in the spectrum ruler for the electromagnetic waves that will carry the information.
    For a voice channel you need 4 KHz (let's say this is 0.5 cm), well you need to use 0.5 cm of the ruler for a voice channel, it doesn't matter where you allocate it, you can use the space between 70 and 70.5 cm as well as the zone between 346.3 and 346.8 cm as long as you use an space that has not been used before.
    The spectrum ruler is of finite length, and we have TV stations using part of it, mobile phones another space, radio stations using another piece... In fact the spectrum is crowded, and everyone all over the world is using part of it.
    Fortunately, electromagnetic waves get weaker with distance, so that if you are using the space between 346.3 and 346.8, me beeing thousands of kilometers away can use that space also, the wave that you emitted in that zone has almost disappeared where I am.
    Well, cell phones are allocated a bandwith around 900 MHz (that's GSM) that is enough only for a few simultaneous communications. Now divide your country in little cells, and in one of them use bandwith centered in 890 MHz, in the cell besides use 900, in the other 910... and now start reusing frequencies, if cells are distant enough, you can use again 890, 900, 910... That's how you can serve thousands of phones with little bandwith. Of course, if it happens that thousands of phones are on the same cell, the system will run out of bandwith, and your mobile phone will not be able to call; this happens sometimes in crowded airports or fairs.

    Blueetooh emits very weak radio waves that reach about 10 meters, so bandwidth should not be a problem.
  • Wireless will probably never obsolete wired lines, for the same reason that large corporations use old outdated computers prone to Y2K glitches. I still use my dependable, rarely has static, corded phone. There will always be bandwidth problems. A large amount of people using cell phones in an area is just like many people talking in a room. Either you share your bandwidth (raise your hand to talk) or you get an undecipherable mess.

    "Assume the worst about people, and you'll generally be correct"

  • Cell phones have the neat ability to negotiate power with the cell tower. [abel.net.uk] When the signal is too strong, perhaps enough to bleed into multiple neighboring cells, they get a packet to turn down the power a notch.

    It would be a nice feature for wireless lan cards to do the same, but I don't see that feature on mine. [attaway.org] I like the ability to select the channel hopping sequence and I use directional antennas for line of sight communication, so there could be a lot of traffic in this neighborhood.
  • Cell phones have the neat ability to negotiate power with the cell tower.
    Bluetooth constantly negotiates power so as not to use any more than absolutely nessecary for error-free transmission.
  • Bluetooth has nothing to do with wireless LAN stuff. NOTHING....
    ...Think palmpilot. Think printer. Think sharing data across the boardroom table WITHOUT IRDA
    Actually, you can do networking over BT, if you're willing to drop to 1Mb/s (I am).

    Also, I can't wait for a Bluetooth 4 button +wheel wireless mouse. Something like a wireless version of my Logitech Mouseman+, or the silver Microsoft explorer thingy.

    In fact, if anyone knows a cordless (doesn't ahve to be BT) 4 button wheel mouse that uses USB instead of serial or PS/2 please e-mail me with details...

  • Does anyone know of a Bluetooth product for the TRGpro? I know that Socket Communications [socketcom.com] will be producing a BT CF card, but they do WinCE drivers (ick). Are there any other companies likely to release a BT CF card soon? TIA.
  • will i be able to do a wireless network from my laptop to my server at home, and still be able to roam around the city while at work? or will this be more of a wireless LAN application?

    The latter, only more so. If I understand it correctly, Bluetooth is meant as an standard of inexpensively and wirelessly interconnecting proximate electronic devices on an a more-or-less ad hoc (and possibly sometimes automatic) basis -- not just PCs, but also mobile phones, PDAs, etc. See the web site [bluetooth.com], especially the FAQ [bluetooth.com].

  • It does matter where you allocate the bandwidth in that the higher the frequency, the higher the bandwidth that it can carry. So, for a set bandwidth, you need a tighther band in the higher freq than in the lower one.

    However, the power needed to push a higher frequency is higher than the lower one.

    Not placing cells using a certain freq range adjacent to each other is a great way to minimize collision problems. Reminds me of a logic puzzle, where you're given x hexagons in three different colors. The object is to fill the game field with the hexagons without two of the same color touching.
  • BT is not meant to be used as an ethernet connection. It is meant to be a cheap connector without wires. Wireless ethernet cards are not cheap at all. It is not like these companies have dropped BT, they have done no such thing at all. They never planned to put ethernet cards in cell phones or use BT to replace ethernet networks. I think you are missing the point of BT; it is a cheap simple plug and play wireless connector. They can't be compared. As far as support goes, will you just look at the companies backing this. BT is going to be huge and not just because its just another wireless networking solution, that is not what it is at all.
  • This is not quite true.
    Yes, at a higher frequency, you can transmit more data.. but this also depends on the exact modulation scheme used, and the size of the band used, and the power levels involved. You can also increase the amount of data you can send by increasing power.
    BlueTooth is SLOW. It's not supposed to be fast. It's not supposed to replace 802.11 wireless ethernet. It's for linking devices together.

    Also, 900mhz cuts through walls like butter (that's why Cellular uses it....). 2.4Ghz sure doesn't.

    Your cellphone has a range of quite a distance, through walls and everything, and operates at a much higher power.

    Bluetooth has a range of 10 meters, IIRC.

    Bluetooth is not for roaming around the city, and not even for wireless lan at home.
    It's so your laptop can communicate with the printer across the room from you, or so your palmtop can share data with the laptop of the guy sitting on the other end of the boardroom.

    It's a replacement for IRDA, in simple terms.

  • Okay Mr. Smart guy.

    Bluetooth has nothing to do with wireless LAN stuff. NOTHING.
    It's not in competition with 802.11, and it's certainly not 'already out the door'. It's JUST barely coming out.

    And it has TONS of support.
    The whole point is that bluetooth is a single $5 chip, that creates a 'personal area network' for about 10 meters around a device. Think palmpilot. Think printer. Think sharing data across the boardroom table WITHOUT IRDA.

    Thinkg that this chip has the radio gear INSIDE it, and it's so cheap that *anything* can be enabled wirelessly.

    It's not supposed to be fast. Or long range.

    802.11 has not 'moved' to 11 Mbps. 802.11 covers MANY modulation schemes on different frequencies, and each has it's own speed..

    Don't assert facts about things you are clueless about.

  • I don't know about wireless data, but I know that here in downtown Indianapolis, don't even try to make a cell phone call between 5pm and 5:30pm. Everyone leaving work tries to make calls on a network with set capacity and it just fills up. Larger cities have moved to a system called microcell. Cells made up of small, inexpensive equipment (sometimes on top of street lights), that don't have nearly the range of large cell towers, but can be deployed in large numbers. So instead of one tower with a range of 5 miles than can handle 10,000 people, you have a shoe box sized system that only serves one square block and can handle 50 people. Overall, you're in much better shape. Also, you then have massive redundancy of overlapping cells. I would imagine that wireless broadband would work the same way, starting with giant centralized systems and moving to a distributed system as more people use it. To respond to the question, I would imagine that you would be sharing bandwidth, but ideally with only a handfull of other people.

    -B
  • NT
    --------------------------
  • The dark side is that there is little to no security whatsoever in the design. Currently "security" exists as a rotating frequency from host to host. This and the 10 meter range on the trasmission is supposed to keep listening down. I think that once enough people get these the frequency hopping routine is going to be broken as easily as the same for cell phones. However, it being an "open" architecture one could impliment their own encryption between hosts that does not currently exist.
    Personally I would like to see the use of the same wireless system that the NFL uses to talk between coaches and players. They supposedly have the frequency hopping like BlueTooth, but they have some sort of encryption chip that keeps chaging between transmissions. ESPN has talked about it before and I can't find the like again. Damn.
  • While calling bluetooth a wireless networking technology is of course correct, it can also be misleading in a world with an exploding wireless lan market and a bunch of up-and-coming wireless communication technologies.

    A better way to understand Bluetooth is to imagine it as IrDA without the line of sight requirements. Today, when I want to read my emails with my PowerBook on the go, I have to carefully balance my Nokia phone on my lap to get line of sight with the laptop. When both my phone and my laptop eventually support Bluetooth, the phone can stay in my pocket. The difference doesn't seem like much, but everyone who has used IrDA on the go must understand how cool Bluetooth is.
  • No, you will be able to set up Bluetooth devices to be "parked" in piconets, the term for small ad-hoc networks formed by Bluetooth devices. You will also have the capability to change security settings so your Bluetooth device will not interact with all devices within the range.

    Bluetooth output will initially be 0dbm or 20dbm, which respectively correspond to ranges of 10 and 100m. With a 10m range and power in the range of milliwatts, I doubt Bluetooth will interfere with anything else that uses the ISM band. There is quite a lot of speculation on how Bluetooth will interfere with IEEE 802.11; but nobody knows that yet; since there is no Bluetooth hardware around to test.

    Oh, and please make sure to bookmark my Bluetooth site [bluetoothcentral.com] so you can visit it when I'm finally ready to launch it..

    --

    BluetoothCentral.com [bluetoothcentral.com]
    A site for everything Bluetooth. Coming soon.
  • We have been hearing for a long time about bluetooth but it is out the door along with most of the companies that said they were going to support it. It was a technology that was great to show off at Comdex, but had no real developer support behind it. Lucent, 3com, Farralon and others have all moved to the readily available 802.11 wireless Ethernet standard. Once considered an underprefomer at 1.5 Megabits per second has moved to 11 Megabits per second. Plus it is completely interoperable with other Ethernet conventions and standard networking protocols.
  • Wow, funny how the company's own press release would make it sound like such a remarkable achievement. So, what does this Really mean for me?

  • Exciting Technology, Good Marketing (Score:3)

    by waldoj ( 8229 ) <waldo&jaquith,org> on Thursday February 24, 2000 @09:10AM (#1248203) Homepage Journal
    Bluetooth seems like a genuine Good Thing(tm). Good marketing, good buzz, good open architecture, and a good technology.

    Am I missing something? Is there a dark side to Bluetooth? It seems like a wholly benevolent and wonderful thing, with no downsides, catches or dark forces controlling it.

    Wow. Quick, somebody burst my bubble. :)

  • Re:Limitations of wireless? (Score:3)

    by jabber ( 13196 ) on Thursday February 24, 2000 @10:25AM (#1248204) Homepage
    Bluetooth is a low power solution. This means that the range of transmission is relatively small. Given this, there are fewer devices close enough to each other to conflict.

    Remember when wireless phones first took off? If your neighbor had the same phone, you'd step on one another, and get cross-talk and what not. Then we got into frequency bands to get around the problem. Frequency hopping addresses the issue somewhat, but it doesn't solve the problem you point out. It's the same air.

    With Bluetooth, the odds of signal collision are relatively small, due to frequency hopping. What's BT's range? I can't recall.. 10 metres?

    You'd have to sit on a full bus of BT enabled people for this to really become an issue.

    As you point out, cell has 'almost' solved the problem. The cells provide enough spatial separation between the phones that only those phones in a particular cell are competing for bendwidth. Since those phones have the ability to choose a sub-frequency that is available in the cell, they rarely conflict. When setting up a connection to the cell tower, they jump frequencies until a clear one is found.

    Bummer when your cell gets saturated though. We'll have the same problem in BT-enabled offices.

  • The prospect... (Score:3)

    by Graymalkin ( 13732 ) on Thursday February 24, 2000 @04:08PM (#1248205)
    of a wireless office/home/world bothers me a bit. Anyone who knows the first thing about EM radiation is that it WILL interact with matter. As it happens 2.4ghz is the resonant frequency of water which is why microwave ovens use it to heat up food. Lets say a 20 year old uses 2.4ghz devices his entire life, it's entirely probable that he will develope some form of cancer due to the RF he used his whole life. I think the 2.4ghz band ought to have been blocked off until sufficient testing could be done so we know exactly how reactive our neurons are to RFI. Yeah I might sound paranoid but I don't want my house or office to be a health hazard because I want to tidy up my wiring. If BLuetooth takes off stupendously most of the toys you buy will be spitting out 1mW of microwaves. That isn't terrible but you need to think in long term exposure, especially for the true geeks that would use these kind of things constantly. Don't get me wrong, I like wireless technologies but like anything else there needs to be a logical process applied to them.

  • Palm also demonstrates BlueTooth unit (Score:3)

    by Masker ( 25119 ) on Thursday February 24, 2000 @10:44AM (#1248206)
    Seems like a lot of BlueTooth devices are being demo'd at CeBIT 2000. This Yahoo report [yahoo.com] talks about Palm Computing's demo of a BlueTooth module for their Palm devices. It's a snap-on module, and would allow for wireless syncing (well, data transfer in general) between it and other BlueTooth-enabled machines (like the laptops this article talks about).

    Will BlueTooth become ubiquitous?

  • Limitations of wireless? (Score:3)

    by billybob jr ( 106396 ) on Thursday February 24, 2000 @09:04AM (#1248207)
    I read in another article (can't remember if it was here on slashdot) a prediction that wireless would overtake wired phone lines. With this push towards everything being wireless, are there shared bandwidth limitations?

    If everyone is on a wireless net connection, are we sharing one big pipe of bandwidth to communicate, like coax, or do we each have a small dedicated piece of bandwidth?

    I would imagine this is a problem that has been dealt with (solved?) in cell phone technology.

  • Not the same thing (Score:4)

    by homunq ( 30657 ) on Thursday February 24, 2000 @11:46AM (#1248208) Homepage
    802.11 is like a wireless lan. It replaces the built-in ethernet cables of your office with plugged-in base-stations. When you connect, you have to do all the same old configuration you had to do to access your lan. Although of course a smart sysadmin will do more than this, the average 802.11 system relies heavily on up-front security: you're either in or you're out, just like with a lan.

    Bluetooth is like a replacement for all the other cables under your desk - the Palm cradle, the keyboard, the doohickey to connect to your digital camera, the printer cable, the cable to your external modem and the 20 foot phone cord out the back of that. It's low-power enough not to need either side plugged in, and the use-model specific interoperability profiles (comm port replacement, input device, ppp, OBEX, printer) mean that (ideally) you'll be able to walk up to an unfamiliar device and actually use it without too much set-up. Each device will enforce its own security.

    It's still an open question whether BT will deliver on its promise. However, BT and 802.11 are not direct competitors. You wouldn't dream of using an 802.11 keyboard to type from across the room, just like you wouldn't dream of replacing all the ethernet cables in your office with bluetooth.

  • Re:Bluetooth is overated (Score:4)

    by TurkishGeek ( 61318 ) on Thursday February 24, 2000 @12:27PM (#1248209)
    Bluetooth specs allow for overlapping piconets, and a member of a piconet (Bluetooth spec's terminology for an ad-hoc Bluetooth network)can also be a member of another piconet. This is called a scatternet and gives you a lot of room to grow. 8 is the maximum number of ACTIVE members in the piconet, some nodes might be parked (up to 255); and it only makes sense that you can have up to 8 active members since the capacity is about 721k anyway.

    Please read this good article about Bluetooth [wirelessdevnet.com] to learn more about the technology, I'm sure it will make lots of things clear.
    --

    BluetoothCentral.com [bluetoothcentral.com]
    A site for everything Bluetooth. Coming soon.

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