Bluetooth 3.0 to be official end of April

(Credit: Bluetooth)

It's official: Bluetooth 3.0 is coming. The Bluetooth SIG (Special Interest Group) will officially announce Bluetooth 3.0 on April 21. It'll be significantly faster and will enable the transfer of entire media libraries at the touch of a button. It also promises a new feature called Enhanced Power Control that reduces the number of disconnects.

The most interesting part of Bluetooth 3.0 is that it uses a combination of technologies that lets it operate at Wi-Fi speeds. For example, you can pair a phone with a laptop via Bluetooth, but then the data transfer between the two devices will be handed off to Wi-Fi, which makes transfer speeds a lot faster. Both devices need Bluetooth and Wi-Fi for this to happen; otherwise it will just use the Bluetooth for data transfer.

More details on actual hardware will come on April 21 when the spec is made official.

[yanchineseguy]

Is there an app out there for a Wi-fi or Bluetooth enabled smart phone that also includes an accelerometer, such as the iPhone, which allows a smart phone to be paird to a laptop and be used as a mouse? That is, the accelerometer detects and sends the movement of the smartphone and transmits that to the laptop to control the cursor, and the softkeys on the face of the phone can be used as the mouse buttons. Since many people carry phones, this could eliminate the need to carry an extra notebook mouse.

[yanchineseguy]

Did a quick search. There are many apps to use smartphones as mice. However, I haven't found one that also takes advantage of the accelerometer that is now built into some newer smartphones.

[ffsteve61]

There is an application named "Air Mouse Pro" for the iphone. I downloaded it and it's pretty cool. Works great to control my Macbook Pro when it is hooked up to my tv. It uses wifi to connect to your computer. It costs 5.99 to download and you also have to go to the companies web site and download the server for your computer.