TipTalk: from Microsoft At Home & At Work : Hardware

What is Bluetooth?

ahawblog — Tue, 24 Jan 2006 01:32:00 GMT

Is the name Bluetooth new to you? If so, read on. (If not, this article may be too basic for your tastes…) If you've seen people walking around with an object stuck in their ear that's vaguely reminiscent of the earpiece that Chief Communications Officer Uhura wore in the original Star Trek TV series, the odds are that what you’re seeing is a Bluetooth headset.

What is Bluetooth?
In an increasingly connected world, many of us find ourselves ankle deep in piles of cables. If you're trying to connect your keyboard, mouse, printer, camera, cell phone, PDA, or other peripheral to your PC, odds are you're using a cable. Likewise, if you're trying to keep your hands on the wheel of your car, you may be struggling with a cable between your phone and ear.

To address these annoyances (not to mention accident risks) Bluetooth is one of several wireless technologies aimed at reducing the number of cables you need to be connected. Bluetooth technology is used to create a small wireless network (called a piconet) between two pieces of hardware through short-range radio signals.

O.K., I simply can't go on to explain Bluetooth without a side note about the unusual name. The super-short story is this: In the mid-1900's, a Danish king, Harald Bluetooth, united Denmark and part of Norway into a single kingdom. (You might wonder if there was a dental-related incident involved in the unification, but we'll likely never know.) The Bluetooth technology name is said to be a nod toward Harald's unification success.

What we do know is that roughly a thousand years after Harald's exploits, Swedish telecommunications company Ericsson conceived the idea for the technology which was then developed by Nokia, Ericsson, IBM, Intel, and Toshiba. Since 1998, Bluetooth has been working its way into the market as a way to connect devices such as keyboards with PCs and headsets with cell phones.

Why another connection type?
Today you may already use several different types of wireless communications. For example some computer products use infrared light waves (like those used between your TV and its remote) to connect things such as printers and cameras to your PC. Because infrared uses light, it depends on a line-of-sight connection, so it doesn't apply to situations where you might have to send a signal around corners or through walls, which you'll often want to do when connecting computers and other devices. For example, when I'm talking on my cell phone, I can leave it on a counter and walk around the house with the headset on and not worry about losing the signal.

Another wireless technology you may hear of or use is called WiFi (for Wireless Fidelity). (By the way, the official name, IEEE 802.11b is a good example of why the Bluetooth name may not be so weird after all.) WiFi also uses radio frequency communications, but is more commonly used for high-speed connections on the Internet and local area networks. If you see someone working on a laptop in a coffee shop, it's likely they're connected to the Internet using WiFi.

Bluetooth can also be used for connecting to the Internet, but today, the more common applications are connections between cell phones and headsets and between PCs and their related mice and keyboards. What's cool about Bluetooth is that after you set them up, two devices using the technology will create and sustain a signal that's unlikely to be bothered by other nearby radio transmissions. People using Bluetooth headsets are fairly easy to spot. What you're less likely to notice are some of the other cool products that use Bluetooth, such as mice and keyboards. Microsoft offers several Bluetooth-enabled products. You can learn more about the technology, the products, and how to get started using Bluetooth here.

Additional sources used for this story:

WiFi Planet
Bluetooth, wireless groups sync up
Bluetooth
Bluetooth Wireless for the Holidays
How Bluetooth Works
What the Heck Is Bluetooth and Why Should I Care?

4 ways to get more out of your phone

ahawblog — Wed, 30 Nov 2005 20:47:00 GMT

Think about the times you've been stuck in a line, or you need to check your e-mail, but don't want to fire up your desktop computer or laptop. Or maybe you want to review a PowerPoint presentation, or whip up a quick Excel spreadsheet to track your holiday gift list while shopping. You can make your phone work for you.

I have a Windows Mobile phone, which means my phone is powered by a mobile version of Windows and similar to my desktop computer. With it, I can do a lot of things that I can't do with a regular cell phone.

1) Read and send e-mail
I was talking to a friend yesterday who had a feature phone from another company. He got e-mail on the phone, but could only get corporate e-mail. I showed him the home screen of my phone. I was getting e-mail from the corporate network, from Yahoo!, from gmail, and from Hotmail. With a quick glance, I could tell exactly how many e-mails I had received from each account. I even answered work e-mails from the middle of the Arizona desert.

If your e-mail account at work uses Exchange Server, you can get your e-mail anywhere, over-the-air. This means that I can sit around in my jammies in the morning, finishing a cup of tea, and read and respond to e-mails. If I want to go out to lunch, but need to keep my eye on a project that I'm working on, no problem. I can set my phone to sync with my corporate e-mail so that I'm instantly aware of new messages.

The set up is easy, if you have all the information you need. Learn more about setting up your phone for e-mail.

2) Find your way with GPS
One of the most useful apps I've found to use with my phone is GPS. I was testing some GPS software designed for Windows Mobile phones at the same time that I was looking for a new house.

It made my life incredibly easier. All I had to do was enter the address of the house I wanted to go see, and I got turn-by-turn voice directions on my phone. Some of the phones come with integrated GPS, but for most of them you need to buy a GPS receiver and third-party software.

I've also used Pocket Streets. This application allows you to download special maps, or make up maps of areas using MapPoint, and then you can download them to your phone. When I was house hunting, I used it to find a coffee shop near a particular house I was viewing, because the maps have points-of-interest.

3) Listen to Music
I like to listen to music, and I own an MP3 player. However, I don't like to carry lots of cords, cables, and devices. My phone comes with Windows Media Player Mobile 10, which means I can sync my phone with my desktop version of Windows Media Player. Then when I jog, I can pack my phone in my fanny pack and listen to music. I also have my phone handy in case I need my husband to pick me up if I decide I really don't want to run all the way back. And I don't have to carry the extra weight of another device.

I've ripped my purchased CDs to my desktop computer, and then synced them to a storage card that I can insert into my phone. It's possible to buy storage cards that are up to 2 gigabytes (GB) for your device.

Another fun function—you can download movies onto your phone. I've watched the oldie but goodie, My Man Godfrey on my phone.

4) Browse the Internet instead of waiting
My husband wasn't convinced that anyone needed all this on their phone, until he went on a shopping trip with his mother and me. He was bored. I handed him the phone, showed him how to pull up the Internet, and he sat down and started reading and replying to posts on his favorite bulletin boards.

There are mobile sites that allow you to make dinner reservations, check traffic, get your horoscope, look up flight status, and more. Our site has a list of some of our favorite mobile sites.

You can actually look at any site on the Internet, but some sites are specifically designed for mobile viewing. I've used my phone to look up all kinds of things—movie times, store hours and locations, the definition of a havelina—while out and around.

So, if you are only packing a regular phone, you might want to think about getting a more up-to-date device. Computers really are getting smaller every day!

—Suzanne Ross

Choosing a digital camera

ahawblog — Wed, 23 Nov 2005 22:58:00 GMT

I recently posted an article on the At Home Web site called Go Ahead, Break Your Camera! Your reader feedback was interesting. Some of you, even a few of the small group who missed the joke and told me how stupid I was, asked some great questions and pointed out ways I could have made the article better. Think of this article as the rest of the story...

Reader feedback on the article boils down to four questions:

1: Why did you bother writing this article?
I wrote the article to try to wring some value out of the experience by sharing a couple thoughts I'd had as a result of my mistake. (I sincerely apologize to those of you who felt I wasted your time discussing the camera incident.)

2: What criteria did you use when choosing a new camera?
I use my camera for travel snapshots, making the following criteria most important to me:

Price: I didn't want to spend more than $200
Size/weight: I wanted the camera to fit in my jacket pocket.
Battery type: I want to be able to get batteries anywhere, so prefer a camera that uses AA batteries.
Image quality: I want to be able to print standard size photos that, to an average person like me, look as good as a 35MM print. (To learn more about image quality, see How Many Mega Pixels do you Need?
Zoom: I want to be able to shoot pictures of wildlife as "close" as possible. (For tips about outdoor photography, read "Take better pictures of the great outdoors."
Shutter speed: I want to be able to shoot pictures of wildlife before the creature in question vanishes from view. One reader pointed out that checking a camera's shutter speed specification can help offset the time delay problem I was experiencing. But like many amateur photographers, I use a point-and-shoot camera. One of the downsides of having the camera do all the work of getting the best picture possible means there's a delay between when I press the button and when the camera takes the picture. If you want a detailed description of the problem I was having with my older camera, this Camera World article Testing Your Camera's Time Delay will help.

3: How did you find the camera?
My husband found the camera and got it for me as a surprise. Using the criteria I outlined above, he shopped online to find the camera that best met my criteria, except he ended up paying a bit less than $200.

There are a number of great online resources that can help you narrow down the choices of cameras based on the features that matter most to you. Camera World is a great place to learn more about cameras and digital photography. To get in-depth (and I mean DEPTH) reviews, check out DCViews, Steve's Digicams, and Popular Photography.

Once you've narrowed down the type of camera you want, you can use sites such as WindowsMarketplace or PriceGrabbers, to compare manufacturers, models, and prices. My husband used PriceGrabber, which, by the way, is a handy place to find rebates and special offers.

4: What did you buy?
I didn't share this information for the same reason I didn't share the name of the camera I broke: it didn't seem fair to endorse or disparage any particular manufacturer, as I'm (clearly!) not a professional reviewer. But in hindsight, it was even less fair not to tell you! The camera I broke was an Olympus (sorry, I don't have the specific model number, but it was a popular point-and-shoot model from 3 or so years ago.) The camera my husband bought is another point-and-shoot model, the Canon A520.

Thanks for the comments, leave more if you like!
At the end of every At Home and At Work is a place where you can leave feedback. To those of you who gave feedback on the "Go Ahead, Break Your Camera" article, thank you so much for your comments. While some of your remarks stung a little, they let me know how I can do a better job next time.

Though it's great to get your feedback on our At Home and At Work articles, what's missing is the ability to share your comments with other readers. On TipTalk, we can do that.

For example, one of the topics I'd hoped to explore in more depth here was digital zoom. But I can't find a good description of the difference between optical zoom (where the camera's lens magnifies the picture) versus digital zoom (where the camera's software manipulates the image to make it look larger). If any of you know of such an explanation, I'd love to share it with other readers. For that, or other information you'd like to share about digital photography, just use the "comments" link below.

—Robbin Young