Americans Want Local Wireless Technology, Not Mobile Video

[Ed Hansberry]

<a href="http://www.infosyncworld.com/news/n/4999.html">http://www.infosyncworld.com/news/n/4999.html</a><br /><br />"According to a new study conducted by research firm Strategic Analytics, American buyers aren't interested in mobile video, music, or games. They want wireless and Push-To-Talk functionality. According to a survey of 1000 mobile phone users in the United States, 54% want a wireless headset for their phone. Although the report does not specify, Bluetooth is the likely candidate for such a feature."<br /><br />As long as it works. :wink: Excuse me while I go reboot my Nokia 3650. The bluetooth to GPRS connection is hanging again. :?

[ricksfiona]

A wired earpiece is so 2002! My T610 works like a dream when it comes to it's BT connections.

[SeanH]

I never thought I would like wireless headset but I tried one and loved it. I am sure there will be a huge market for Bluetooth headsets. It’s great to leave the phone on your belt clip or in your briefcase and make calls with the headset. Voice dialing works great on my Nokia 6820 and the Logitech Headset. The audio quality on the headset is better then the phone. After using this configuration I immediately wanted more functionality. It would be great when a call comes in to use a voice synthesizer and say the name of the caller in my ear. If I am screening my calls I have find the phone before I answer it. I am sure features like that are in the future.

This is a personal review I put together in the last week of some of the headsets I tried.

http://www.mbu.com/headsets/

Sean

[rbrome]

Okay, so over 50% want a wireless headset, but it also says that "22% of those surveyed listed Bluetooth on their want-list" :?

I think this illustrates perfectly that most U.S. consumers have no idea what Bluetooth is or why it's useful. It's not surprising, since there has been practically zero marketing for it here. The most I've seen or heard about Bluetooth in the mainstream media is an Acura TV commercial that mentioned it, but of course didn't explain it at all.

U.S. carriers keep saying "they don't see the demand for Bluetooth", and point to surveys like this. Well, duh - it's clearly a chicken-and-egg problem. Consumers need to know what it is before they can want it or not. The question is not "do they want it", it's "is this something we can sell", emphasis on SELL, as in market and promote. Grrr... (end rant)

[Duncan]

Excuse me while I go reboot my Nokia 3650. The bluetooth to GPRS connection is hanging again.

The poor thing can't help sensing the hostility...! ;)

On a general note - I was flicking through a US PC magazine in my local newsagents (I think PC World?) and there was an article specifically on why Bluetooth hasn't taken off in the US. It looked at IT development in Europe, Asia and America as being led by different technologies - in mobile phone dominated Europe this has led to natural Bluetooth adoption - in the PC focussed Americas, with MS dragging their heels on BT integration, Bluetooth adoption has not had the same impetus...

[Jason Dunn]

...in the PC focussed Americas, with MS dragging their heels on BT integration, Bluetooth adoption has not had the same impetus...

Absolutely! Until Microsoft has full Bluetooth support in Windows XP, it will bit see mainstream adoption in North America.

[jt3]

Maybe I'm missing something, or maybe I've got some weird magnetic field going or something, but I've always had really bad luck with BT headsets. I don't have a problem keeping them sync'd with the cell phone, but even if I have the cell phone in my hip pocket, or on my belt, I still get poor reception. I've tried several BT devices, and haven't had good luck with any of them yet.

I know the range is supposed to be in the ballpark of 30 feet, but is anyone else having issues like this, where you can't keep a good headset signal a measley 3 feet away?

Note: Now, at my office, I have the Plantronics CS50, which is a 900MHz headset, and it works flawlessly. Throughout the building, I get no static whatsoever, regardless of walls or number of metalic cubicle barriers between me and the receiver. It just plain works. I dont' expect a BT headset to be able to reach across the entire office, but I do expect a static-free signal for the promised 30ft range... or, at least, something close.

[SeanH]

I reviewed four of them here http://www.mbu.com/headsets/ and found they all start having problems past 15 feet. 15 feet is a lot better then a 6ft wire from the headset to the phone. I am sure they are designed with low power in mind and can not achieve that 10 meter (33ft) BT spec.

Sean

[Ed Hansberry]

U.S. carriers keep saying "they don't see the demand for Bluetooth", and point to surveys like this. Well, duh - it's clearly a chicken-and-egg problem. Consumers need to know what it is before they can want it or not. The question is not "do they want it", it's "is this something we can sell", emphasis on SELL, as in market and promote. Grrr... (end rant)
Consumers demand a feature - like wireless headsets in this article. The carriers should provide that feature. If BT is the mechanism to provide the feature, then that is what they should give us.

However, consumers, as a rule, won't demand a particular technology. They will demand a particular feature and leave it up to someone to make it happen, not really caring about the bits or gears necessary to do so.

[rbrome]

Consumers demand a feature - like wireless headsets in this article. The carriers should provide that feature. If BT is the mechanism to provide the feature, then that is what they should give us.

Definitely. No disagreement there.

"No demand" is just what the carrier spokespeople tell me when I ask them about Bluetooth.

I think this new study is first to break out that feature instead of just asking about Bluetooth. That proves your point - that consumers care about the end-result feature, not the underlying technology.

But it also proves my point, which is the carriers have so far been very shortsighted in dismissing Bluetooth. They were flat-out wrong when they thought consumers didn't want Bluetooth - they just weren't asking them the right way. If anyone in charge had simply had a little vision and said "hey, this is really great, people will want this once they understand it", and set out to promote it... But no, no one wants to take any risks (except on 3G, apparently).

But now that this study has asked the question the right way, and revealed what we all knew - Bluetooth is great and people want it - hopefully it will change the minds of the powers that be. We can only hope! :D

[dmy]

As long as it works. :wink: Excuse me while I go reboot my Nokia 3650. The bluetooth to GPRS connection is hanging again. :?

LOL another chance to get on my Bluetooth soapbox :multi: (as he sits here in the Denver Airport on GPRS via Bluetooth because yet again the damned ATT WiFi isn't working on the B concourse....)

First you need to start with a phone that actually adheres to the bluetooth standard.... Nokia is notrious for not doing Bluetooth to spec and causing all sorts of compatibility problems.

Cheers,
David.

[Steven Cedrone]

First you need to start with a phone that actually adheres to the bluetooth standard.... Nokia is notrious for not doing Bluetooth to spec and causing all sorts of compatibility problems.

Too bad! Especially since Nokia is a promoter member company of the Bluetooth SIG...

Steve

[Duncan]

First you need to start with a phone that actually adheres to the bluetooth standard.... Nokia is notrious for not doing Bluetooth to spec and causing all sorts of compatibility problems.

Too bad! Especially since Nokia is a promoter member company of the Bluetooth SIG...

Steve

As indeed are Microsoft.

Some choose to blame the standard, or look to a successor to Bluetooth (both approaches rather missing the point), when in truth no matter what the technology, no matter what the standard, some companies will screw it up.

[Ed Hansberry]

Some choose to blame the standard, or look to a successor to Bluetooth (both approaches rather missing the point), when in truth no matter what the technology, no matter what the standard, some companies will screw it up.
And no matter how bad it they have messed it up, someone will jump to their defense. Again and again and again and again.


:lol:

[Duncan]

Some choose to blame the standard, or look to a successor to Bluetooth (both approaches rather missing the point), when in truth no matter what the technology, no matter what the standard, some companies will screw it up.
And no matter how bad it they have messed it up, someone will jump to their defense. Again and again and again and again.


:lol:

And some will continue to confuse the defending the perfectly sound and effective standard with defending the companies who mess it up/implement it badly - again and again and again and again (no matter how illogical that is)... :roll:

[Jonathon Watkins]

Well I for one am looking forward to getting a BT headset quote soon. I want the wireless part with low power consumption, so BT it is. I eagerly await seeing how it goes.

I tend to lean toward Duncan's augment, that it is the companies that have screwed up implementing it. But, I have a lot of sympathy toward Ed's argument that the BT standards committee should never have let this happen.

:dilemma:

&lt;shrug> Hopefully that is history now and current and future BT devices should work together better. One can hope can't they? :wink:

[denivan]

Excuse me while I go reboot my Nokia 3650. The bluetooth to GPRS connection is hanging again.

What exactly is a bluetooth to GPRS connection ? ;-)

No seriously, the Nokia 3650 looks like a fisher price 'my first phone', so you should have expected its BT implementation to be poorly LOL

[Duncan]

But, I have a lot of sympathy toward Ed's argument that the BT standards committee should never have let this happen.

How do the commitee stop giants like Nokia and Microsoft from doing whatever they want?

It would be rather like blaming the W3C org for not preventing MS from screwing up standards with Internet Explorer...

I'll make the prediction now (and I feel so secure in this that I'd happily put big money on it!) that any BT rival standard will have exactly the same thing happen - some particpants in the standard will mess up their own implementation.

One role we can play, as technologically savvy people, is to buy (and push others to buy) devices from those who implement BT standards properly. Five minutes basic research via google tells you that if you want a Bluetooth device you don't buy - for example - Nokia...

Should we have to do this researh? No - of course not! In the real world, however, all consumers have to do this with anything technological - or you run the serious risk of buying a lemon...

[Jonathon Watkins]

But, I have a lot of sympathy toward Ed's argument that the BT standards committee should never have let this happen.

How do the commitee stop giants like Nokia and Microsoft from doing whatever they want?

They could perhaps withhold the Bluetooth Logo from devices that don't meet the standard? Philips is certainly threatening to do with with copy protected CDs that don't meet the official CD standard (Red book?).

We don't seem to have had all these compatibility problems with WiFi............

[SeanH]

After reading this tread it looks like BT is plagued with one problem after another. I have had limited use with BT but out of the 7 devices tried they all worked the first time. Once devices were paired they connect when in range. I do not own a PDA with Bluetooth yet but it almost seems that most the complaints come from PPC users trying to interface with other devices. Each PPC BT implementation is created by the manufacture of the device. Maybe once MS has full support for BT on PPC these problems will go away.

They could perhaps withhold the Bluetooth Logo from devices that don't meet the standard? Philips is certainly threatening to do with with copy protected CDs that don't meet the official CD standard (Red book?).

The last headset in my review http://www.mbu.com/headsets/ did not have a Bluetooth logo on it and it said on the box it was not Bluetooth certified but will work with other Bluetooth devices. I did not try it because it was to big.

Sean

[epdm]

Hi,

I have a Sony Ericsson T68i, MSI bluetooth PC stick/dongle and had a Toshiba E800 BT. They worked flawlessly with each other. Except for the stupic Microsoft ****-activesync which ALLWAYS resets the serial-port that it listens too to com1 while my BT E800 uses COM6. So I manually have to change active sync to com6 before firng it up. But after that all the items work perfect. Syncing, surfing etc. I used the PDA to enter SMS-messages and send them via the T68i. Much more convienent to use the PPC's onscreen qwerty-keyboard (especially with that gorgeous 4" screen) than using that tiny keypad on the phone with it's multi-tap input.

Indeed it's very odd that US hasn't adopted BT so well while the US-market is so similar to the European market.

Regards,

Manu T