Can your teeth do this?

We stopped by the BlueTooth show area to see what was shakin' and found a good number of vendors giving their pitches and showing product.  From our tour, it seems that BlueTooth still doesn't know what it wants to be when it grows up!  Does it want to just be a replacement for those pesky wires that you'd otherwise need to connect together the pieces of your wearable computer?  Or does its really envy its HomeRF, WiFi and even CDPD siblings and want to be a real wireless networking standard?

 

As we made our way through the many BlueTooth LAN card vendors, we found two European companies that are definitely in the "real LAN" camp.  Red-M's booth was small, but eye-catching, and they definitely had some visitors interested in their "Red-M enabled world".  The scenarios were similar to those pitched by the Web-enabled phone, CDPD, and every other hand-held device maker, with visions of wireless services at the ready in every airport lounge, shopping mall, etc.  The key to their pitch is that if BlueTooth really does get cheap enough so that it's included in just about any electronic device that you can think of, it just might work!

If red isn't your color, maybe blue would be better.  Blue2space's Blueball Communicator and Accessor aren't as sexy looking as Red-M's stuff, but they also want to be your "extended-range BlueTooth" supplier.

The HomePlug power line networking industry group is still hanging in there, but if they don't start shipping product soon, it won't matter much, judging from the lack of activity around the HomePlug alliance's booth.  Strangely enough, the most HomePlug activity we found was around a somewhat confusing booth that we couldn't tell who it belonged to!  The busiest folks in the booth were from Phonex Broadband, who were showing their PX-801 NeverWire jack.  It's HomePlug compatible and projected to ship in "Summer 2001" for $80-$90 an adapter.  (But guys, please kill your Flash-ridden Web site before then and get something up that can be easily and quickly navigated!)

We get a good deal of mail from Dialpad, Paltalk and other free Voice over IP (VoIP) users, asking for help in getting these apps to work through a shared connection.  So we thought we'd see if there was any hardware coming on line that would make the job easier.  We set out to find boxes that you could plug a phone into and that would connect to a LAN via Ethernet, wireless, or HomePNA methods.  The previously mentioned Linksys BEFN2PS4 was the only in-the-router solution we found, but we also came across a couple of other products worth a look.

Net2Phone seems to be making deals all over the place, mostly with software bundles.  But they also have a pretty broad line of hardware products, marketed under their Yap (Your Alternative Phone) name and a couple of them caught our eye.  The Yap Jack is a standalone box that allows you to make calls to either other Yap users for free or to any phone for a fee.  You plug a regular phone into one jack and the Yap Jack into a regular telephone line and the box takes care of all the VoIP magic, with no PC needed.  If you have a PC, you can use either a Yap Phone (which plugs into your PC's USB port), or the new Yap USB Hotline (not available yet) which works with your PC, but lets you use your own phone.

Interesting stuff, but not what we were looking for.  But it turns out that the Yap MultiMax and newer Net2Phone Broadband Internet Gateway (gee... haven't heard that name before..) have 'em, but neither product was at the show.  We'll do some more digging and try to get one of them in for review.

While passing by the huge Creative area, we happened to see "VoIP" on one of the displays and moved in for a closer look.  What we found was some competition for Net2Phone!  The Creative VoIP Blaster uses technology licensed from Innomedia and plugs into your PC's USB port.  You then install software which allows you to make PC to PC (free) or PC to Phone (for $) calls.  The product should be available soon for about $50, which includes credit for 100 Minutes of PC to phone calls in the US (or 500 to Hong Kong!), USB cable and headset/microphone.  Innomedia was also showing their DreamCall product, which adds VoIP capability to Sega DramCasts!  Great for trash talking your opponents to gain the edge you need to win!  Didn't see any Ethernet-based products, but we'll keep digging!

That about wraps it up.  Some great new stuff is coming out, and we'll be getting a lot of it to evaluate.  So check the Reviews section frequently to see what's new!

Other info? Corrections? Rumors?  Let us know!