HP To Shortly Ship $149 Bluetooth PC Card
Product First Fruit Of Alliance With 3Com
By Joseph F. Kovar, CRN
Palo Alto, Calif.
8:07 PM EST Fri., Sept. 15, 2000
Hewlett-Packard on Monday will unveil an alliance with 3Com Corp. to offer Bluetooth wireless computing for its desktop and notebook PCs.
The first fruit of the alliance, a PC card with Bluetooth capability, is expected to start shipping on Nov. 1 with an estimated street price of $149, HP officials say.
At that price, the Bluetooth PC card is an automatic sale, says Miles Austin, owner of Focus Computers LLC, a Redmond, Wash.-based solutions provider.
"Once we know it is available,shipping in quantity,we would probably make it an automatic add-on, and the customer will have to tell us to take it off," he says.
Companies are constantly moving people around inside an office, and Bluetooth technology could be a way to cut the cost of moving their data nodes, Austin says.
He says the barrier to selling wireless networking solutions has been its cost. If a solution provider can show how a wireless solution such as Bluetooth could cost less than what a business would spend over a three-year period to wire and rewire employee connections, clients will begin adopting the technology, he says.
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