OK, I'm not proud about it but I've learned to live with it.  I'm a geek and I love geek toys.   There, I said it.   I know I'm not alone -- there are other geeks, wannabe geeks, closet geeks and a few older geeks (greek geeks?) out there who also love geek toys.  So this blog is for you.  Get ready for a trip to the toy store, you geeks and geekettes!   We're going to have some low-cost fun here.

One particularly fun toy is laptop bluetooths.  Many of the newer laptops come with Bluetooth. If you have such a laptop here are some capabilities you might find useful. If you're shopping, here's a couple reasons to pay for Bluetooth in the laptop.

Bluetooth is a "Personal Area Networking" protocol and physical layer system. As it sounds, it's made for connecting things over short distances, typically around your person. Most of you are aware of Bluetooth headsets, an untethered way to connect that growth in your ear to your cellphone or even your MP3 player. It's very fast and robust but short ranged (call quality starts to break up when my cellphone is about 15 or 20 ft away from my earphone) ON PURPOSE. Now, you will also find Bluetooth printers and scanners and other peripherals. Bluetooth is SUPPOSED to be very easy to configure (one half finds the other, they introduce themselves, they ask you to OK their "pairing" - like the groom asking the bride's dad to put away the shotgun - and they will remember your permission in the future) but sometimes things don't get "DISCOVERED" when they should - anyone remember Microsoft Windows 95 and Shrug ‘n' Pray?

OK, so the takeaway here is that Bluetooth-enabled cellphone can do two things with your laptop. The first one doesn't cost you anything - you tell your laptop that it's OK to associate with your cellphone and then it can be used as a speakerphone. When waiting on terminal hold, you can take the phone away from your ear and use the speakers in your laptop to hear Stairway to Heaven by The Living Strings or other fine elevator music. The implementation with my Treo 700vx and my Lenovo T500 Thinkpad isn't ideal - I can hear the other party OK but they tell me that they're missing every other word. Don't know if the phone or the laptop is at fault but my Plantronics BT headset doesn't have this problem.

The second one is that you can use your phone to provide Internet connectivity to your laptop. If you're often places where there's no WiFi and wired won't do, your cell provider's EVDO or similar bandwidth can be connected to your laptop. If you don't already have an Internet-enabled cellphone (like a Treo or Crackberry or Q) you're better off with a dedicated Cardbus card for this purpose. But if you DO have Internet on your cellphone, you can often extend it to your laptop. Verizon charges me $45/mo to have Internet on my Treo. They add $15/mo to permit this "tethering" I mention. This connection is usually done with a USB cable. But, consistent with this post's theme, you can use Bluetooth to tether, and not have to mess with the wire. The downside is that the datarate (typically 400kb/s for EVDO) will be reduced to some degree by the Bluetooth - but if all you're doing is some quick web surfing or email w/out big attachments, you may find web-over-cellular-via-bluetooth (WOCVB or WoCViB - Hey, I just invented my own new protocol!) to be faster and there's one less cable to remember.

Try it out.  Then let me know what you think.  Cool or fool?