For a start, the company is working with a number of mobile phone operators including Motorola, Ericsson and Nokia, to provide notebook-handphone connection over its Armada notebook computer range.
According to Compaq's product marketing manager, portable personal computer (PC) division, commercial PC group Ray Toves, the Bluetooth initiative will be one of the drivers of NonStop connectivity for mobile users, in a local area network/wide area network environment.

The company, he added, intends to become the first to release Bluetooth-enabled products into the market. "Our strategy is to incorporate the Bluetooth technology into all our client devices which will be made available once the market is ready," Toves told reporters in Singapore on Monday.

He said by end of this year, Compaq will introduce PC cards for notebooks, desktops and other computing and communication devices which would enable users to enjoy Bluetooth capabilities in a simple and cheap way.

Toves said with Bluetooth already a standard, it will be only a matter of time before devices that run on the technology become available and widely used in Asia. "There will be many other PC peripherals and other mobile devices such as cameras and headsets which will be Bluetooth-enabled well into next year."

He said initially, Bluetooth enables devices would be affordable enough, and the technology would come as a standard feature and not an add-on within the next one year.

Bluetooth is designed to enable users to connect a wide range of mobile computing and telecommunication devices easily and simply without the need to purchase additional or proprietary cabling to connect individual devices and potentially replaces multiple cable connections via a single radio link.

The technology delivers opportunities for rapid ad hoc connections and the possibility of automatic connections between devices.

Bluetooth is designed to carry one megabit of data per second, almost 20 times faster than a 56 kilobits per second modem, but its range is limited to 10 metres.

The technology, which is expected to eventually cost as little as US$5 (RM19), is designed to work anywhere even on airplanes.

A report by market research group Cahners In-Stat in December last year predicted that there would be more than 670 million Bluetooth-enabled devices worldwide by 2005.

Since it was announced in May last year, the technology has garnered broad support in the computer and communications industries. More than 1,300 companies have joined the Bluetooth Special Interest Group, a trade organisation of companies planning products based on the technology.

Microsoft, 3Com, Lucent and Motorola recently joined the Group's leadership committee alongside its five founding companies -- Ericsson, IBM, Intel, Nokia and Toshiba.

<  |  >