Is it worthwhile to look at Bluetooth for the office?

Where does it leave Bluetooth? Is it worthwhile to look at Bluetooth when replacing laptops, printers and scanners for personal and small office applications? Is it not a matter of Bluetooth becoming obsolete as soon as the R & D costs have been recovered?

Wi-Fi was developed as a local area network technology, connecting workgroups of computers to an adjacent wired network through an access point. Most Wi-Fi LANs have a radius of no more than 300 feet per access point.

In principal, it would be handy to use Bluetooth and Wi-Fi together. For example, use Bluetooth to connect your PDA to your printer, your phone to an earpiece, your mouse to your PC. Then use Wi-Fi to connect your PCs to an access point that enables access to the Internet. Unfortunately there's a catch -- Bluetooth and Wi-Fi use the same 2.4 GHz radio band in an incompatible manner. Standards bodies are working on ways to overcome this, but right now it's not a good idea to try to use Bluetooth and Wi-Fi in exactly the same place.

Where this picture gets a little fuzzy is when you start looking at Bluetooth access points. Yes, these devices do exist, and they fulfill the same role as a Wi-Fi access point -- connecting a group of devices together to create a small network. Of course, the devices must be very close together, and currently they would share less bandwidth than is available in a Wi-Fi LAN. In short, Bluetooth can be stretched to overlap with the low end of what Wi-Fi was designed to do.

It is not a matter of one technology being superior to the other, but more a question of using the technology most appropriate for your business application. You can stuff a tree into your car trunk or tie it to your car's roof, but it's just easier to haul a tree home from a nursery in the back of a pick-up truck. On the other hand, most of us don't really want to drive a pick-up truck when we're heading out for a fancy dinner. Buy Bluetooth devices and adapters when you want to interconnect peripherals without cords and you won't be disappointed. I don't think Bluetooth will become obsolete for those applications anytime soon. Wi-Fi still isn't a really a very good choice for embedding in cordless earpieces, keyboards, and cameras -- small peripherals that you just want to connect without fuss.