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Bluetooth Evolution Conference (3): Parrot making noise
November 01, 2007
Jens-Uwe Soehner, from Parrot, gave a great talk yesterday as part of the session covering Consumer Electronics. Parrot have really driven the market for Bluetooth in the car. Their car kits were the first ones to look good, be beautifully packaged, and (oh yeah) actually work well! :-) They've been growing rapidly, and have a "fabless" approach to manufacturing (they design the products and contract out the manufacturing), which gives them agility and flexibility in creating new products.
Recently they've been expanding in to other areas, including Photo Frames, and Wireless Speakers. It was the latter area that Jen-Uwe covered in his talk.
In particular, he covered such practical issues as:
- No one wants to pair to individual left and right speakers to set them up - the user perceives it as "a pair" and expects to see the pair appear as one entity when they scan, connect, pair and use. This was a really obvious point, but I have to say, hadn't occurred to me until he said it!
- Some of the issues involved in setting up and calibrating a pair of wireless speakers, especially with regard to issues of latency (basically: how to ensure music arrives and plays through both speakers in sync). He also covered how much more complex this gets in 5.1 surround sound systems, where audio must sync to videa streams.
- Power: could people adjust to the idea of "your speaker needs new batteries" (for home stereo/AV speakers)? Would they be re-chargeable? How can they be designed to minimise power drain.
Great talk. look out for it when the slides are on the site. Meanwhile, I'm looking forward to getting my hands on their cool new speakers.
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