Bluetooth: Where Are The Compelling Products
By Andrew M. Seybold
14 December 2001 Subscribe to Forbes/Andrew Seybolds Wireless Outlook newsletter.
The week of December 10, Key3 Media held the Bluetooth Developers Conference at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. This event was the "official" developers' conference sanctioned by the Bluetooth SIG (Special Interest Group). This was where you went to see what is new in the world of Bluetooth, and to see when the technology will be "real."
Bluetooth, as you may know, is different things to different people. However, the purpose behind Bluetooth that I subscribe to is that it is a "wireless wire"-a wireless system that replaces the wire between a cell phone and a speaker/microphone or the wire between a cell phone and a notebook or PDA. It has also been called a PAN or Personal-Area Network (as opposed to a Local-Area Network or LAN). It is supposed to let us exchange business cards between PDAs, set up small, close, ad hoc networks, enable our PDA to use our wireless phone to connect to a wide-area wireless network, and to provide hands-free speaker and microphone capabilities for our wireless phones.
Since Bluetooth is "late" to market-that is, later than the Bluetooth community hyped what would become available when-the 802.11b or Wi-Fi community seems to think that they will rule the wireless space and displace Bluetooth. What they fail to realize is that 802.11b devices require a lot more current than Bluetooth devices. If you put an 802.11b device in a wireless phone you will impact the battery life of the phone by an order of magnitude while a Bluetooth device will have almost no effect on standard battery life.
The Show
This particular show was to be the "coming out party" for Bluetooth. We were supposed to see lots of Bluetooth-enabled phones that were ready for prime time along with PDAs, notebooks and other devices. The Bluetooth story is already three years old and much of this was to have already happened in previous years. However, as with any new technology-especially when the standards are being driven by hundreds of companies-it takes longer to bring real product to market than the engineers ever imagined.
Bluetooth will be a success, of that I have no doubt. It fills a need on both the voice and data sides of the house, it solves many connectivity issues and it will be inexpensive to implement (some day). In the meantime, what I found interesting about this developers' conference is that the companies there were showing devices, software and even chips that should have been in the market at least a year ago.
Ericsson was there with a few models of its phones with integrated Bluetooth onboard. Motorola was showing a single Timeport phone that included Bluetooth and a fairly large earpiece and microphone with which you can answer and make calls by pushing a button on the side of the device and using voice dialing. But the Motorola folks said that their plans to build Bluetooth into other phones were dependent on demand. So we are back to the chicken and the egg problem. When there is demand we will build more products, but how will we drive demand if there aren't products in the marketplace that provide people with a choice of devices?
Most of the show was about test equipment, Bluetooth chipsets and software stacks. This is not surprising since it was a show for product developers. There was an HP printer with Bluetooth onboard and a number of companies showed their access points (devices that connect Bluetooth-enabled devices to a network). One company, Visteon, was showing an auto radio with Bluetooth built into it. When you get into your car, a Bluetooth connection is automatically made between your Bluetooth-enabled phone and the car radio. You can then voice dial and answer the phone by pushing a button on the dashboard and using voice commands. The system uses the car's audio speakers in conjunction with a small microphone mounted on the dashboard.
But on the whole I came away with the same feeling I had when I visited "Bluetooth Ally" at Comdex-Bluetooth is still not ready for prime time and there are few products to get excited about. Part of the problem is that the promise that the cost of the parts would go down from $20 to $5 has hit the reality wall and devices are a lot more expensive. Another part of the problem is that most of the companies working on Bluetooth are assuming that the data portion of the system will drive demand.
I look at it differently. I believe that the voice side will be the big driver for the first Bluetooth products, for example, hands-free devices that let us access our wireless phone or desk phone when we are in the office. Several carmakers have committed to Bluetooth for hands-free kits in their cars starting next year. The beauty of the Bluetooth hands-free car kit is that car owners are not married to a specific phone as they are today. Any Bluetooth handset should work with any car that is equipped with a Bluetooth hands-free kit.
There were many announcements as well, but nothing that a consumer could really get excited about. But again, this was a developers' show, not a show for the general public. Even so, it appears to me as though the Bluetooth community is spending most of its time talking to each other and not spending time paving the way for products that should be forthcoming next year.
If Bluetooth is to be a successful wireless business tool, the Bluetooth community needs to start showing real products with compelling uses and getting these products into the market. Each time I attend one of these shows I am concerned that the Bluetooth world seems to consist of very smart engineers and few, if any, marketing-savvy folks.
The bottom line is that at some point the engineers have to turn this technology over to the marketing folks and they have to start creating demand by introducing hot products with sizzle-products that make us feel like we need them in our arsenal of business tools. So, my plea to the Bluetooth community is: Show me some compelling products that will make my life easier, and get them into the market now. You are already two years late. Don't make it three!
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