It's still early enough in the development of Bluetooth that its Developers Conference (held last week in San Jose) is still full of real developers, people with their hands actually on the technology. In the exhibit hall you were likely to see a crowd of hackers looking over the shoulder of a nervous but excited engineer who was trying to get his invention to work (often, it didn't). Very little PowerPoint; lots of exposed circuitry.

Bluetooth is the wireless technology originally envisioned by Swedish phone maker Ericsson as a way for small devices (mobile phones, PDAs) to communicate with each other at short ranges -- under 10 meters. But of course, if you can make these transceiver chips small enough and cheap enough to go into phones and PDAs, you can put them just about anywhere, and that opens up many more possibilities. (For more background on Bluetooth, see Albert Proust's "Personal Area Network: A Bluetooth Primer" on O'Reilly Network.)

There have been some delays getting the first products onto shelves. At Comdex in November 1999, Bluetooth prototypes in laptops, PDAs, and cell phones were shown and promised for delivery in 2000. Some of those prototypes reappeared at Comdex 2000, but products are starting to go online, and it looks likely that in the first half of 2001 we'll start seeing some Bluetooth-enabled products.

Here's a sample of some of the things shown at the Developers Conference.

PC cards and USB plug-ins

Toshiba and IBM were both showing PC cards that included firmware from a Danish company called Digianswer. Expect them to retail in the first half of 2001 for between $100 and $200.

IBM and Toshiba were both demonstrating Bluetooth PC Cards at the show. These are similar to the IEEE 802.11 wireless LAN cards we've started to see this year, in that they slide into a PCMCIA slot on a laptop and let it communicate wirelessly with other devices. But while wireless LAN cards usually connect a computer to a local area network (and from there, to the Internet), these cards connect it to other Bluetooth-enabled devices within range, things like your Palm computer or cell phone. Expect to see these PC cards come on the market the first half of next year, probably in the $100-$200 range.

Intel's Bluetooth USB Adapter plugs into the USB port. It will retail for under $100, and should be in stores by this spring. At the show, Intel was using it to connect two laptops playing Quake II.

Intel, on the other hand will aim at a wider consumer market. In addition to licensing Bluetooth technology to include as part of its package of offerings to computer manufacturers, Intel will sell a shrink-wrapped Bluetooth USB Adapter. It looks like a flat, blue thumb and plugs into the USB port on a laptop or desktop machine. Intel reps at the booth said they plan to sell it on the shelves at stores like Best Buy, and they want it to be as affordable as Apple Computer's wireless AirPort cards, which sell for $99.

IBM was one the few vendors demonstrating a PicoNet, a wireless network of up to eight Bluetooth devices. Here, two Thinkpads, an Ericsson cell phone, an IBM Workpad (Palm clone), and a security badge from Ensure Technologies all share a connection. You can link up to 10 PicoNets in a ScatterNet, enabling communication of up to 80 Bluetooth devices.

One of the problems getting the technology off the ground has been that a single Bluetooth appliance is like the sound of one hand clapping. If you were to buy the Intel USB Adapter, take it home, and plug it into your desktop computer, it would sit there, waiting. But bring home the Bluetooth adapter for your Visor handheld computer, and the two can talk. Bring home your laptop from the office with its Bluetooth card, and all three can talk. That's when the fun begins.

Magic Sticks and security badges

CTech's Magic Stick is an OCR scanner, a wireless mouse, an input pen, and a digital camera.

CTech was demonstrating its Magic Stick, which looks like a bulky pen but is actually an optical character recognition (OCR) scanner, a wireless mouse, a "Graffiti"-style writer for input, and a digital camera capable of 1/4 VGA quality. In addition to scanning and inputting text (with about 95% reliability based on a non-scientific quick sampling), its software does a neat trick with URLs: It spots them and passes them to the browser. (That should put a crimp in CueCat's business model.) The digital camera is of minimum quality, but it shows off Bluetooth's very respectable 700-Kbps throughput.

Ensure Technologies was demonstrating a more practical business application, but one that sheds light on some of Bluetooth's less savory applications. Its Xyloc security badge includes a Bluetooth transceiver that will lock down a computer when the wearer-user turns away from the screen. Get up to go get coffee? Your screensaver comes on and hides any sensitive data. On the other hand, when the pink slips come, it's possible for IS to instantly lock out everyone on the "to go" list, "before they even have a chance to fire off one nasty e-mail," according to the Ensure rep who was explaining the feature to someone at the conference.

So when can we buy this stuff?

How much of this is one-shot prototype and how much is ready to roll? Bluetooth took some heat last month for having its second annual "coming out" party at Comdex. But the products are actually starting to come to market, and 2001 looks like the year of Bluetooth.

Ericsson's headset.

Ericsson's headset, which communicates wirelessly with several models of its high-end phones via a Bluetooth adapter that plugs into the phone, is promised "before Christmas." Don't expect to see too many right away: In addition to the price of the phone, the cost of the Bluetooth adapter and the headset could run in the $400-$500 range.

IBM is already selling its PC Card online (but it's back-ordered).

The problem, of course, is that any one Bluetooth device is of little value -- the sound of one hand clapping. It's only when the second device arrives (and the third, and the fourth) that things will really start to get interesting on the Bluetooth front.

David Sims was the editorial director of the O'Reilly Network.

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