On Wed, 6 Apr 2005, IT Support NZ wrote:
Thanks for the info!
Still why blue tooth and not 802.11? Cheaper and works around corners.
Why blue tooth?
I have the April edition of that nifty MyMobile magazine on my desk, (it includes a PDA and MP3 player and a mobile buyers guide). (Good Magazine by the way, definitely the thing to buy if you are considering such things)
The cheapest Pda with Wireless is $698, the cheapest with WiFi and Network and-or 3G is the HP iPaq H6365 at $1199. My Sharp GX15 is the cheapest bluetooth & networked device on the market at $399. The cheapest networked device that is capable of communicating wireless (via IrDa) to a third device is the Panasonix X200 at $199.
In other words, the unit cost for a bluetooth device is _much_ lower, and apparently the battery consumption is much lower too.
Yip, I agree, WAP is dead in the water, why bother. Good for downloading ring tones, end of story.
Accept that now with Bluetooth, I can buy a component with a blue tooth protocol stack embedded in it for US$7.
So I foresee embedded devices being faceless black boxes with the cell phone as the UI, microphone, speaker, security token and network connection.
WAP is merely another convenient low cost / low bandwidth component to put at the server end in the tinker toy architecture.
http://www.kannel.org/
Kannel is a compact and very powerful open source WAP and SMS gateway, used widely across the globe both for serving millions of short messages (SMS) and pushing WAP service indications.
Besides, at the moment all this is in the "Personal Improvement" category. I'm buying these devices out of my own pocket / "midnight engineering", with no anticipated resale.
If I ever switch to full on development mode, I definitely will keep in my Jack Gannsle's rule of thumb.... "Development costs are three times higher on a resource constrained system".
John Carter Phone : (64)(3) 358 6639 Tait Electronics Fax : (64)(3) 359 4632 PO Box 1645 Christchurch Email : [EMAIL PROTECTED] New Zealand
Refactorers do it a little better every time.
