Dummies, Wireless

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Part IV: Using a Wireless Network
� Go hands-free in the car: Face it — driving with a cell phone in your
hands isn’t safe. Using a headset is better, but the best choice (other
than not using your phone while driving) is to use a completely handsfree
system, which uses a microphone and the speakers from your car
audio system. This used to take a costly installation process and meant
having someone rip into the wiring and interior of your car. If you
bought a new phone, you probably needed to have the old hands-free
gear ripped out and a new one installed. No more — Bluetooth cars are
here, and they let you use any Bluetooth-enabled cell phone to go handsfree.
Just set the phone in the glove box or dashboard cubbyhole and
don’t touch it again. Keep your hands and eyes on the road!
If your current car isn’t outfitted with Bluetooth, don’t despair. Dozens
of Bluetooth retrofit kits are available on the market — ranging from
simple speaker/microphone devices that plug into your 12-volt power
source (the lighter, in other words) to custom-installed, fully integrated
systems that can even use your car’s steering wheel controls.
� Get your laptop on the Internet while on the road: We think that the
best way to connect your laptop to the Internet when you’re out of the
house is to find an 802.11 hot spot (we talk about them in Chapter 16),
but sometimes you’re just not near a hot spot. Well, worry no more
because if you have a cell phone and laptop with Bluetooth, you can use
your cell phone as a wireless modem to connect to the Internet. With
most cell phone services, you can establish a low-speed, dial-up Internet
connection for some basic stuff (such as getting e-mail or reading
text-heavy Web pages). If your cell phone system (and plan) includes
a high-speed option (one of the 2.5 or 3G systems we talk about in
Chapter 16), you can get online at speeds rivaling (although not yet
equaling) broadband connections such as DSL — all without wires!
Some cell phones have Bluetooth capabilities but have been artificially
limited by the cell phone companies. For example, some Bluetooth phones
have had their software configured by your cell phone company in such a
way that you can’t use the phone as a modem for your laptop, as described
in the preceding bullet. There’s no easy way to know this up front — but it’s
a good reason to read the reviews in sources such as CNET (www.cnet.com)
before taking a leap.
Bluetooth Smartphones and PDAs
In addition to cell phones, the other category of device that’s seeing a great
deal of action in the Bluetooth arena is the PDA category. The term PDA (personal
digital assistant) encompasses a wide range of handheld computing
devices — and therefore, PDAs are also often referred to as handhelds.
The most common types of PDAs are