Your Mobile Phone As Your Personal Wireless Hub
from the connect-me dept
We've written stories about various companies (both big and small) working on the idea of the personal phone hub. The basic concept is that instead of trying to cram increasingly more features into a tiny phone device, you go with a much more modular approach. You design a single central "hub" that has a cellular wireless connection to the world, and then you create various peripheral devices that have a short range wireless (Bluetooth) connection to the hub. Thus, you can just keep the hub in your pocket and if you need to make a phone call, you pull out the phone module. Need to surf the web? Pull out the web surfing module. The nice thing about this is that you only need to deal with one wireless connection and device makers can make sure each device has a form factor that fits its use - rather than cramming it all together. The downside, of course, is that it just means more gadgets to carry around. While all these firms kept working on the idea of a personal hub, a Chinese firm, Cellstar, realized that if your mobile phone has Bluetooth, it already is your personal hub. Thus, they're getting ready to launch a web surfing device that will connect to your phone via Bluetooth to get its connection out to the world. I have no idea how well it will work and the details, other than some vague details and a picture, are lacking. Still, I could see how this concept makes a lot of sense for some people, and allows them to be a lot more flexible in how they use mobile devices.
Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.
While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.
–The Techdirt Team
Reader Comments
Subscribe: RSS
View by: Time | Thread
No Subject Given
[ link to this | view in thread ]