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Slides from the Java Mobile and Embedded Conference
A few people asked about the slides from the Java Mobile and Embedded Conference. I stuck them up on SlideShare, and here they are through the magic of embeds. Now writing a few articles on the background and future options for JSR82. if anyone has suggestions, thoughts or input - please shout!!
Thanks to C. Enrique Ortiz in particular for his excellent code samples contained herein, and shamelessly listed from and accredited to his set of tech articles.
NFC and UWB
The BBC named both Near Field Communication (NFC) and Ultra Wideband (UWB) as two of their top five technologies for 2008.
Good news for Bluetooth - which is incorporating both technologies in Bluetooth as part of their world-dominating "embrace and extend" philosophy!
In-depth review of Bluetooth experience in Cars
Really excellent, in-depth review of current options for using Bluetooth in the car. Also has some excellent coverage of the issues and limitations of audio quality in Bluetooth (versus other standards).
Also covers the 3rdi security camera.
Healthcare: Bluetooth in Prosthetics
Mentioned before here that one of the great potential areas for Bluetooth to be used is in various forms of Healthcare scenarios, especially in monitoring one or more vital stats about a person, and transmitting that back to a gateway, mobile device, generic collector, etc.
Here's a new one on me: Bluetooth in Prosthetics. Good article on how Bluetooth is used in artificial legs for a US Irag vet from CNN.
Fascinating.
Off topic: Readium - Rollable Display
Just back from Mobile World Congress, the Artist Formerly Known as 3GSM Conference. One of the coolest things I saw was a rollable display from the gang at Polymer Vision.
This was like seeing something straight out of "in the future, we'll have...." made real. A kind of Minority Report moment. It really works (for reading), and is going to be available end Q2 this year. Niiiice.
Sony Ericsson and Fossil have new watches....
These are very tastily done. I see one in my future. Y'know, for research purposes :-) On a serious note - we'll start to see volume Bluetooth-in-watches towards Christmas '08, imho. More information here: http://www.howardchui.com/2007/06/15/sony-ericsson-fossil-launch-new-bluetooth-watches/#comment-8917
Assorted Bluetooth Products (and a small bit of madness)
Watches
Watches will be big for Bluetooth - trust me - especially once the Ultra Low Power stuff is integrated in to the standard. In the meantime, we're beginning to see products from Fossil and this latest one from Turtle Wireless.
Printers
Polaroid have announced a ZINK (zero ink) based Digital Instant Photo printer that uses Bluetooth, among other things. Ideal for printing small photos from cameras wirelessly.
Robots
- The Spykee will let you move and sneak around taking pictures to be sent to your mobile phone.
- Similar in some ways to the Sony Ericsson Rob-1, mentioned here before
Industrial
See the Schenck Bulk Solid Metering control - evidence of more "traction" for Bluetooth in Industrial or machine-to-machine applications
And finally
Bluetooth madness: XMPP based Jabber Powered Bluetooth Doorbell
Neato: Adapter for your iPod Dock
The Intempo Digital BTA 01 - a little adapter that you can plug in to your iPod Dock. ocks thinks there's an iPod there, and you can stream music from any suitable phone or other music source over Bluetooth to it. Pretty well priced, IMHO.
Detailed Headset Review: Plantronics Voyager 520
A detailed reviewed here of this Plantronics headset. One of the most useful aspects of the review is that he actually pairs it with multiple phones and tries it out, reporting back any issues.
MapMyTracks with JSR82
I promise to try this one out and report back.
MapMyTracks uses a java Applet to track and record your position using either built-in GPS (if the device has it) or an external GPS unit via Bluetooth. It uses JSR82 in the latter case.
Specifically targeted at Sports scenarios - track your run, cycle, sail, etc. Site looks half-decent - but the devil's in the detail. I'll see if it works with my Sony Ericsson and an external Bluetooth GPS and report back.
Congratulations to Open Interface North America
Belated congratulations to our colleagues in Open Interface North America, who have been (quietly) acquired by Qualcomm.
OINA make of the the great Bluetooth Stacks, and have seen some killer product wins for their solution, especially around Audio, in the last few years. Eagle eyed readers of the legal notices on the iPhone will have spotted that it's their stack in there.
We've met a good few of the OINA people over the years, and they're a pleasure to do business with. They're even more of a pleasure to have a pint with :-)
Anyway - congrats to all. Looks like a great fit. We look forward to seeing your stack turn up in many new places and products.
Now if only Qualcomm had a JSR82 solution .... :-)
Happy Birthday Bluetooth : "Long May Ye Run"
Belatedly, I must wish Bluetooth and the SIG a very Happy 10th Birthday.
I think that the SIG has been playing a stormer recently, in terms of growing brand awareness for Bluetooth, integrating other cool short range wireless standards, and simplifying life for users. The future for Bluetooth looks very, very bright indeed!
- 1.8 Billion devices shipped to date
- 500 Million Bluetooth enabled phones shipped last year
- All main game consoles now ship with Bluetooth
- New product categories emerging in Industrial, Healthcare, Automotive by the week
"Long May Ye Run"
As part of the celebrates at CES, the SIG announced their winners of the Best of CES a while back at the CES show. My favourite is definitely the Parrot Wireless Speakers (review here) - the Parrot products generally rock, and I never appreciated how tricky it is to do this well, until I attended some of the talks at the Bluetooth Evolution Conference back in late '07.
One key to rule them all
From the "such an obvious good idea store": The Nokia E51 has a dedicated Bluetooth Key. How handy is that?
Bluetooth Marketing Update
As discussed last year - mobile marketing with Bluetooth really seems to work, and the stats in terms on user-engagement, when it's implemented responsibly to the "right" target audience, are off the scale.
- Marketing targeted at men in clothes stores in India. Get them to play games while they shop. As they play and win, they get discounts.
- Football clubs using Bluetooth to market to fans in the UK. Free content and downloads for fans at the games. From BluePod Media.
- And another from the UK, posters that are "active". Particularly interesting as it's a local authority behind this (as opposed to a mega brand or marketing company).
Bluetooth is inherently local. As I have mentioned before here, there are some good angles to use Bluetooth to promote contextually relevant offers and information. By definition, when you connect to a Bluetooth service, to some extent, that service "knows" where you are ("in train station", "in football stadium", "in store") and can impute some things about what you're doing, or what you might be interested in. The benefits for marketing and promotions are obvious. Watch for Google to add some sizzle in this area as they get Android handsets out to market.
Headset Roundup
In no particular order, some headset fun and games over the last while:
- A headset that talks to you and will act on voice commands, from BlueAnt
- High end audio supplier Etymotic gets into Bluetooth
- And Motorola keep on trucking, despite handset woes
- Review of the Plantronics Voyager:
- And finally - for the "yoof" market - Yo mama, smack my Bluetooth headset up with this Bluetooth Dog Tag These sort of headsets (wear something round the neck, and connect earpieces from that) are a strong subset within the overall headset game, partly because they tend to look like "normal" earphones when on, and yet offer some of the genuine handsfree "don't strangle and tangle me" convenience that Bluetooth brings by eliminating some wiring.
All in all - better headsets, prices, battery life and features. And a little bit of innovation. 2008 will most likely see headset sales go well beyond the 70M shipped in 2007. Personally - I'm for a dwgtag one :-)
Sun has Mojo!
Yes - I know it's been quiet here for a while, for which I apologise to both my readers. I'll hopefully be more active over the next while.
This is a brief update on the Java Mobile and Embedded Developer Days event which I was lucky enough to attend a couple of weeks ago in rainy (yes, rainy!) Santa Clara. Hosted by Sun, and organised by Terrence Barr and Roger Brinkley (and supporting team from Sun), this was the first time such a gathering of the Mobile/Embedded Java community had been attempted by Sun.
And it worked! Several hundred people attended, maybe 200 or so in person, and another couple of hundred joined in remotely, via the excellent ustream.tv platform. Check here for videos from the two days. James Gosling kicked off the proceedings, and from there on it was quite a mix of detailed technical and community sessions covering everything from 3D to Robots to Security to the notion of a Developer alliance.
Highlights for me included some detailed coverage on SunSpots, the embedded hardware/software wireless sensor platform from Sun, including the announcement that they have open-sourced the Squawk VM; the TrackBot talk and demo (uses SunSpots); the presentations on JXTA, now with new proxyless ME implementation, and the general updates on tools, phoneME and all the other goodies coming down the tracks.
All in all - quite a lot to digest, and in my case, I had to miss a lot of Day 2 due to other work commitments. All the slides are available at the site, and Terrence has a good wrap-up here.
Half the value of any event like this is really the interaction with the people at the event, and this one really delivered. The attendees were mostly practitioners in the wireless/embedded area, and so the quality of questions and general banter at the show was very high. I also got to meet C. Enrique Ortiz, whom I've wanted to meet for a long time, as he's written pretty much the best articles on JSR82 and Java/Bluetooth over the years.
My talk was on "Past, Present and Future of JSR82, the Java/Bluetooth APIs". It was well-attended, and seemed to go well (always hard to tell).
All in all, an excellent event, and I look forward to the next one. I also got a sense of a certain "buzzed-ness" around the Sun people there; they were upbeat, passionate about their projects, and pretty excited about the potential for the new developments in the Java mobile / embedded arena. For a company that's had its trials and tribulations over the recent years, this was great to see. I look forward to seeing how things turn out for Java and Sun in 2008.