10.3 bluetooth tutorial
Dave Miller has a very cool tutorial on getting GPRS running with OSX and a bluetooth phone.
Bluetooth is something I've wished Apple would pick up on in a much bigger way, and judging by the rumors that are constantly about of their "iPhone" I'm not the only one. It's not that they haven't started integrating it, or been doing some nice work on it, especially in the area of interference. Just that they've introduced virtually no catalysts for it. Yeah, their wireless mouse & keyboard, but those are lame as hell.
There are three really cool things about bluetooth:
- It's local, with a small sphere of influence
- It consumes very little power
- It's cheap as hell
So far, it's been pretty tame from Apple. It's included with their powerbooks, but not the iBooks. And as a build-to-order option with the PowerMacs, but not the iMacs or eMacs. And, if you don't BTO it on the PowerMac, you're SOL, you can't add it later. So, there hasn't been a big push.
I don't know precisely what the current cost for a bluetooth chipset is, but a few years ago it was somewhere in the $10 range. I'd have to believe it's gone down, and some quick googling shows people like Texas Instruments offering BT chipsets for under $5.
Posted by drunkenbatmanJanuary 20, 2004, at 06:10 PM
