Bluetooth — named after King Harald Bluetooth because he lived in Denmark between 910 and 940 and controlled Norway remotely — offers a cheap way for two devices to communicate with each other.

It’s low cost because you don’t need a network infrastructure — both devices just need to be Bluetooth-enabled — and because it doesn’t use up too much precious battery capacity.

A cure for all ills? No, and no-one claims so. One obvious limitation is that, at the moment at least, for the two devices to communicate, they usually need to be within ten metres of each other.

But wire-free communications is in demand, outside the warehouse and factory and inside — and it’s a demand that many technology providers are gearing themselves up to meet.

Splash of colour

Intermec is about to splash the new colour version of its Bluetooth-enabled 700 pocket PC all over Europe. You can use the new portable computer to connect to an 802.11b wireless local area network (WLAN) or to other Bluetooth devices.

According to Intermec vice president Mike Colwell, the reason for including Bluetooth as a connectivity option is that it’s being “absolutely demanded” by customers.

He points to one activity that’s clearly at the top of the wish-list, wireless printing.

Frontline Solutions readers are familiar with the basic arguments for wireless printing. People who have to print items, such as barcode labels or delivery notices, as they move around their place of work have traditionally (though not literally, thank goodness) been bound by wires. It’s time to set those people free.

Colwell comes up with some interesting additional reasons for going wireless.

Cable connections fail

In many cases, logistics professionals work in the rain and have to print and deliver their paperwork to customers in wet conditions. They can keep printer and paper dry by wearing them on a belt loop underneath their waterproof clothing, but the hand-held computer needs to be out in the rain.

Colwell says it’s not unusual in these conditions for a cable connection between handset and printer to fail every 90 days or so, which is expensive, inconvenient and a long way short of ideal in a customer service environment. Bluetooth is a good answer.

The same applies to logistics operators who work in snowy and icy climates. They often have a fixed-position printer in the cab of their trucks. On arrival at a depot, drivers will typically get down from the cab, greet the customer, climb back up to print the delivery notice and then down again to start unloading goods from the back of the lorry. This can involve negotiating the slippery steps to the cab several times.

Bluetooth means the driver doesn’t have to climb back into the truck to start the printing process, thereby cutting out one trip and reducing the chance of injury.

It’s far from a deal-breaker at the moment, but Colwell says it’s not unheard of for logistics companies to help cost-justify rolling out Bluetooth technology by calculating the reduced risk of litigation from injured employees.

“Getting rid of wires is always a good experience,” Colwell says, “and Bluetooth is great for that.”

He explains that a previous Bluetooth-enabled version of the 700, a monochrome one, scored a big success with one of the largest home delivery companies in the US. “They liked the Bluetooth printing option,” he says, “and ordered somewhere north of 7000 units.”

Intelligent solutions

But there are more supply chain applications than wireless printing. Plugging a Bluetooth-enabled computer into a physical docking station in a truck, for example. As soon as the truck enters the delivery yard, the device starts communicating details of the load to the customer’s back-end systems.

Also, a Bluetooth headset working wirelessly with a voice-enabled hand-held computer, which the Intermec 700 colour has the capacity to be, would be what he calls “a very intelligent solution”.

In the first of these examples, it’s clear that wireless LAN connectivity would do the same job. If a series of trucks was arriving at the same time, say from different third-party logistics providers or different suppliers, wireless LAN — with its many-to-one capability — would be the better option, especially as it can increase the range of connectivity to several hundred metres in the right environment. But, if peer-to-peer is what you need, Bluetooth has its place.

Inside the four walls of the warehouse or the manufacturing plant, Colwell says Bluetooth will be useful “in the long term”, but he’s not so sure about right now.

He admits that demand for Bluetooth is stronger in Europe, but says people in North America are coming round. Pessimism — brought on because people there had no personal experience of using Bluetooth — is lifting now, he claims.

“Bluetooth has moved beyond the hype,” Colwell says, “and the disappointment people felt when they found out Bluetooth wasn’t going to cost $5 has passed. As if it could ever have cost $5 — even a mouse (a non- Bluetooth one) is more than $5, unless you buy a really crummy one — but that’s what the hype promised.”

The proof is that large companies in the US, such as the home delivery company mentioned earlier, are willing to try Bluetooth now.

Hands free and wearable

This ties in with the view of rival supply chain hardware supplier Symbol.

Its biggest Bluetooth success to date was at United Parcel Service. With Motorola, it won a share of a deal last year to supply back-of-the-hand scanners — which communicate over a Bluetooth connection to a hip-mounted terminal — to workers in UPS distribution centres.

The project is for a new package-tracking system. It’s reported to be costing the transportation company $100m in total and will take until 2004 to complete. As part of it, Symbol should ship 50000 Bluetooth-enabled scanners, as well as large volumes of wireless LAN technology.

It caught the eye of no less a luminary than Peter Keen, co-author of a book called The freedom economy. Keen insists that freedom isn’t about convenience. He says it’s about changing the limits of what is possible within the structures of everyday life.

Buying a book on the Internet from Amazon is convenient, he argues, but it doesn’t change people’s lives.

In the mobile world, Keen says there is a tendency for technology providers to limit themselves to building wireless versions of PC or wired Internet applications and that’s not the way to go.

Freedom fighter

At the beginning of 2002, he said the UPS deal with Symbol and Motorola was “the most important m-commerce announcement” he had seen to date.

He loved the idea because a Bluetooth scanner on the knuckle was a great way to give the workers use of both hands. Keen loves it when technology gives people more freedom.

According to Symbol product manager Andy McBain, freedom is a big driver for his company too as it incorporates Bluetooth into its products.

“Bluetooth ties in very well with our hands-free and wireless wearable stories,” he says. “It revolutionizes wearable computing. People who use wearable computers are really restrained by a cable connection.”

And as for hands-free, he believes UPS is a good example of what you can do. Workers in the UPS distribution centres are handling big packages and they need the use of both hands. Symbol’s back-of-the-hand Bluetooth scanner gives them that.

McBain’s company developed the device — it goes by an internal product name, Emerald — specifically for UPS, but based it on the SRS-1 scanner, which users wear on their index finger.

Emerald will go commercial later this year; the SRS-1 will follow in 2003.

But McBain stresses that Bluetooth is only a complement to his company’s other wireless offerings, something that can co-exist with wireless LAN, but not take over from it. “It’s definitely not a replacement for wireless LAN,” he insists. “Its major use is always going to be as a cable replacement.”

But it’s clearly something Symbol is taking seriously. The whole co-existence thing has taken lots of work, including close liaison with the relevant standards committees.

“That’s more difficult than it sounds,” McBain says. “Bluetooth and WLAN are often working on the same wavelength so you have to make sure you can avoid interference.”

Symbol’s Bluetooth scanner application proves that this technology can offer a series of solutions to supply chain workers. But even McBain agrees that wireless printing may be the main area to benefit.

Which must be good news for Zebra.

Fed up with fixed-point

For some time now, it’s been the experience of the specialist supply chain printer manufacturer that many of its customers were fed up with having to go back to a fixed-point machine every time they wanted to print a barcode label or receipt.

Perhaps this explains why Zebra’s mobile printer division has been the fastest-growing in the company for the last two or three years.

According to Les Dickin — product marketing manager in Europe for the mobile division — mobile printers and better industrial hand-held computers mean labels can now be printed on demand on the shop floor, in the warehouse, in the van or anywhere.

Demand is the key word when it comes to Bluetooth. Zebra now has Bluetooth-enabled versions of printers from three of its product families: the Cameo, the Encore and, especially, the new QL320.

It’s already sold 3000 Bluetooth Cameos to a retail group in Mexico, close to 2500 units to a transportation company in the UK, and more than 1000 to a parcel delivery firm in Poland. These are good deals and there are more on the way.

Dickin explains: “We’re finding in the majority of evaluation exercises we’re doing now that our prospects all want to go Bluetooth.”

Why? Because of the benefits of being able to use a printer attached to your belt as you wander around. It’s a great solution, Dickin feels, for people in warehouses, factories, depots or vans.

Not just that, though. Bluetooth’s status as an open standard means his customers can use their Bluetooth-enabled printers with a wide range of devices instead of being tied in because of proprietary code.

What people want, in short, is flexibility.

Nightmare on cable street

Tony Revis, general manager of rival printer manufacturer Extech, doesn’t usually agree with Zebra but he does this time. He explains that cables “are a nightmare and always have been”.

The reason is that they have lots of what he calls points of weakness, most notably the two connectors with their breakable pins.

Yes, you can increase the robustness of a cable, but usually only by making it heavier and more expensive. “Bluetooth is being heralded now as the saviour of wireless communications,” Revis says, “but people have tried all sorts of ways to get rid of cables .”

He argues that Bluetooth is still expensive compared to one of the earlier ways, infra-red, which, he says, was particularly successful in output devices such as printers (in spite of the need for line of sight).

“But as the cost of Bluetooth comes down,” he says, “it will become more and more viable.”

He says most manufacturers have been “incredibly slow” to bring out Bluetooth-enabled products but believes we’re going to see a broad range of applications with Bluetooth in the near future. “The integration of Bluetooth into other products is not trivial,” he says, “but it’s this integration — particularly into Windows CE devices — that will make it take off.”

And so to Socket Communications. This company specializes in connection products for CE-based devices, including cards and software development kits to help manufacturers build in Bluetooth.

Martin Croome, European general manager, claims that the Socket card is the only one in the marketplace that doesn’t have an antenna sticking out. This, he says, was a major factor in attracting Symbol to his company.

He points out that Socket is also the force behind the Bluetooth embedded design for Intermec devices and, through this, has established a business relationship with printer manufacturer O’Neill.

Power-hungry, expensive LANs Croome agrees with what other interviewees have said about Bluetooth being right for mobile printing — attaching a printer to an 802.11b network is, in many instances, “way overkill”, he says.

But he feels Bluetooth is going to make a big impact in the near future in industrial environments. It will offer, he says, control from a mobile device to bits of the machinery, perhaps a piece of equipment that doesn’t justify the expense of a wireless LAN connection. He describes wireless LANs as “power hungry and expensive”.

Away from the factory and the warehouse, Croome believes mobile and wireless technology to be the logical next phase of computing.

“The first ten years were about getting some kind of computer system in place to automate internal processes and provide corporate information,” he says. “Then it became a question of providing wider access to that information, for example over the Internet. But now it’s about giving that access to people who still don’t have it, the people who are mobile but who are capturing very important information all the time.”