9.04 – The great joke here is along the lines of ‘Evian’ water’s name. The first commercially available bottled water happened to be ‘naïve’ spelled backwards. A little cheeky but not offensive enough to stop its creators from claiming millions of consumer dollars. The latest version of Bluetooth technology introduces some fancy stuff like, “reducing the power consumption when devices are in the sniff low power mode,” and, “allowing role switches on an encrypted link.”

Only after the third revision do we hear what great pun Bluetooth’s creators enjoyed. Danish King, Harald Blåtand inadvertently loaned his initials to the Bluetooth logo. Where Blåtand negotiated between warring parties, Bluetooth negotiates between otherwise incompatible devices with no shared standard other than the Bluetooth standard. Harald Blåtand was remarkably advanced, eh? Hardly. Many sources put his birth in the year 911!

WIKI’s short description of Bluetooth’s origin along with several other sources state that “blue tooth” is a near translation to Blåtand. Our Danish/English dictionary confirms that, yes, ‘Blå’ is blue and ‘tand’ is tooth. So it’s not quite a stretch to imagine the look of this pre-Colgate grinning Rex. In the interest of teaching something other than trivia, here’s some standard information that regular Bluetooth users already know…

Bluetooth can best be described as a very smart, lightning quick card dealer (1,600 cards a second nominally) to whom you give the cards back. Each player at the table represents a different channel and the game itself in the network or ad hoc environment for a user. No matter if it’s a mouse, an ear piece for a phone or a laser emitted keyboard for the PDA, each packet (or card in the game) is sent and returned and the channel (or player in the game) is instantly changed reducing interference greatly.

What kind of information being sent in packets doesn’t matter. The signal is strong and fast and come in low-power and medium power modes changing to cover differing physical conditions (small room, big room, house). The frequency range in which Bluetooth chitters and chatters and ‘deals out cards’ is open and available the World over ensuring an ear piece to work in Hong Kong as well as Miami, Florida. Microchips of assigned devices are immediately recognized on set-up.

Bluetooth is about being productive without wires. The Bluetooth site should well be considered the, “Bluetooth Classroom” of choice. With Bluetooth Version 2 transferring at 3 Megabytes per second, it’s a solid choice for smaller productivity environments like printing from the PDA and using the phone hands-free in newer cars. With over 500 million units at the end of 2005, old Harald Blåtand is somewhere smiling pretty.