It"s a question of time if Bluetooth companies want to see blue skies--five minutes, an industry group leader plans to tell developers this week. Mike McCamon, executive director of the Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG), says he will urge SIG members at this week"s Bluetooth Developers Conference in San Jose, Calif., to adopt a "five-minutes-out-of-the-box" mentality. That design approach would ensure that it wouldn"t take longer than just a few minutes for Bluetooth novices to start wirelessly connecting devices--any longer, and that important first impression begins to sour.
"For the market to achieve the success we believe is possible, we"re going to have to deliver a "five-minutes-out-of-the-box" experience," McCamon said. "We"re going to have to be that easy. There are products out there that do this, but we need to raise the level."
At the conference, the Bluetooth SIG also intends to release some new technical wizardry and suggestions for standard ways manufacturers can add Bluetooth to products that will help them meet the five-minute time frame. McCamon declined to release any of those details. A couple of years ago, there was nothing but blue sky for Bluetooth, a standard for creating a very powerful but very short-range wireless connection. Introduced by the mobile phone industry, where it has already established a significant presence, Bluetooth allows people to create "personal area networks" (PANs) connecting mobile phones, PCs, handheld computers, headsets and other devices. Back in 1999, analysts believed 200 million personal computers and 80 percent of all cell phones would be wirelessly connecting via Bluetooth by now.