Bluetooth. Awesome.

I can’t believe I’ve been miss­ing out on this for so long. It’s use­ful for so much more than hands­free head­sets and brain-killing wire­less headphones!

My phone has a pre­sen­ter mode when paired with a PC (and, yes, it can be used as a mouse as well… but I’d never do that :P) and works at a range of at least five meters (which was kind of as far as I could walk whilst still see­ing a screen in this place). You’d pay $90 for that kinda gad­get on its own!

The only prob­lem I’ve got with it is the lack of a pre­sen­ter timer built in — if it had that, it’d be per­fect. Guess that’s what you pay the $90 for these days :P

If I ever said any­thing bad about Blue­tooth just being a gim­mick, con­sider it suf­fi­ciently retracted.

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posted on Thursday, January 4th, 2007 at 6:06 pm by Josh, filed under Geek.

3 Responses to “Bluetooth. Awesome.”

  1. swylie says:
    Friday, 5th January, 2007 at 4:19 pm

    OK -
    1. I’m only both­er­ing to reply because i arrived at the air­port 2 hours early for a flight
    2. Mobile phones = the presenter’s worst night­mare (inter­fer­ence with video/audio devices)
    3. The only tru­ely use­ful appli­ca­tion I’ve found for Blue­tooth is for a wire­less note­book mouse — not hav­ing to attach a USB don­gle for a wire­less mouse is just cool — other than that, Blue­tooth is boring…

  2. Josh says:
    Friday, 5th January, 2007 at 5:14 pm

    If you dis­able the phone fea­tures (flight mode, but with Blue­tooth still enabled) it should be fine. Actu­ally, I did a bit of very infor­mal test­ing with this thing, and it doesn’t seem as bad as reg­u­lar GSM in terms of audio inter­fer­ence. Maybe UTMS is at a dif­fer­ent fre­quency that’s Less­Bad™, or some­thing. I don’t use CRT mon­i­tors enough to be able to tell if it does funny things to them or not (I have mem­o­ries of GSM phones doing such things).

    Blue­tooth is bizarre in terms of secu­rity flaws/features and rel­a­tive ease of use (and hence use­ful­ness — why would I use Blue­tooth to send a small file if MMS is faster and eas­ier?), but there are some cir­cum­stances in which it’s ideal: send­ing >100KB files — PDFs, uncom­pressed pho­tos from phones with 5MP cam­eras (appar­ently a new Black­berry is meant to?), and so forth. And don’t say you can use email on phones for that, because email on phones is (gen­er­ally speak­ing, for the non-Blackberry-toting crowd) an over­hyped farce that, in terms of usabil­ity, near-universally fails to deliver.
    </soapbox>

  3. Sam says:
    Wednesday, 10th January, 2007 at 4:45 pm

    This com­ment is not related to the con­tent of this post, but it is funny how easy it is to tell that you are on hol­i­days from uni. :D

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