PocketMatrix

4 feet is perfect for mobile devices. Leave your phone in your pocket, when they do get this magnetic thing, and surf the web or whatever without having to worry about broadcasting to other people. Like if you are giving credit card information to a website and you don't want someone to pick up. And if you wanted to go online outside, why not do wifi, it has a longer range.

This is not completly true. The PAN profile supports access to a LAN via NAP.

PAN profile specification available here:

I wonder if these devices would screw up the magnetic strips on credit cards etc if you put a phone using magnetic induction in your pocket with your wallet. Also if you put a non-shielded speaker (playing music) between two devices, their signal would probably be totally drowned out by the speakers.

I doubt it would do anything with the credit cards, but the speaker scenario may be valid.

How far will BT go then? I've heard you can get Dongles for the PC that will communicate up to a 100 metres away? Is this true? It's be cool if I could leave my PC online then go over the road to my mates and take my Pocket PC with me 8)

100 wide open meters. And most devices are only powered for 10 meters. I'd suggest you go with WiFi if you want to try to do something like that, though.

100 meters? The , using a single hop between two WiFi devices, is 310,000 meters (310 km).

However, more down to earth at the , a team used $98 worth of materials from Home Depo to create an antenna that spanned the 40 mile distance between two mountains in Nevada.

At the same contest, a competitor with a Orinoco PC card in a laptop used a handheld antenna to cover 5.1 miles. That antenna was constructed of two Hormel Chili cans soldered together.

A team used two stock omni-directional ("all" directional like typical WiFi cards) to transmit 10 miles.

Dan East