Tuesday, January 1, 2008

Bluetooth still not there?

Okay, for those who have been using bluetooth headsets and other bluetooth cellphone connectivity kits for a few years now, you probably think it's great. Folks using the Nintendo Wii may not even know they are using bluetooth for the Wiimote to talk to the Wii. Bluetooth is low power and relatively fast these days. So how could it still not be "there"?

Many folks may not realize this, but the bluetooth standard has been around for well over ten years now. The original whitepaper referenced several "cool" things you could do with it. One of these perfect applications was opening your garage door. Yet, in all this time, we still can't open our garage doors with bluetooth! Sure, some googling results in some talk of garage door bluetooth projects, and the fact is the adventurous among us can use bluetooth to open our garage doors. But the fact of the matter is there's no off the shelf product to do it. You won't find any add-on kits at Home Depot or Lowes, nor will you find a new garage door opener mechanism that works with bluetooth.

To me, this is a perfect application of bluetooth. In fact, you should be able to control a bluetooth garage door opener not just with a cellphone, but with that bluetooth enabled car stereo you may have. What else is missing? I would love to be able to remotely turn on or off my home alarm system with a bluetooth device. If automotive key fobs were bluetooth, we could get some amount of control to have ONE keyfob that could let you start any of the cars you own. Remotely, in fact.

I'm constantly amazed at just how little acceptance we've seen with bluetooth given just how long it's been out there in the wild. (And yes, I do also find it strange myself that my third blog post here has two of the three heavily about garages.)

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