Mannerisms

Ever since I went to a Silicon South-West Conference on wireless issues last December and heard Peter Gardner, the head of the wireless sector at 3i, ask the audience for a display of hands of all those who had managed to implement a Bluetooth pairing which was not a pairing between a headset and a phone, I have realised that my own problems in this regard are widely shared.

Only five out of a hundred put up a hand. And in the audience was James Collier, CTO and co-founder of CSR, the No.1 Bluetooth vendor. (Unfortunately I didn't notice if his hand was up or down).

So when, last February, the CEO of Artimi, Colin MacNab, said that his company would put an NFC die in a Bluetooth/UWB package to perform the pairing, I thought that one of life's thornier little problems had at last been solved.

All you'll do is wave your Bluetooth device over the piece of equipment you're connecting to, like an Oyster card over a Tube access gate, and Hey Presto, you're paired. Hurrah!

Surely everyone's going to do this, I thought. Wrong it seems.

Talking to another Bluetooth vendor this week I got the answer quoted above. "We might do it for non-technical users".

Well come on guys, Bluetooth's pretty enormous now, what sort of users do you think you're getting?