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.
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