ON A NEW WAY TO GO WIRELESS

CLOSE AND PERSONAL

Like many geeks, I've been waiting for a new wireless data transfer standard called Transfer Jet to finally get close to being available to consumers.  

David Pogue of the New York Times explains how we may be close to finally seeing this technology deployed later this year, with  this review  of an understated, but cool technology:

"At the Toshiba booth at the Consumer Electronics Show a couple weeks ago, a rep showed me a new technology called Transfer Jet. 

I sure hadn’t heard of it, but apparently it’s an upcoming industry standard. Toshiba, Sony, Canon, Casio, Kodak, Nikon, Olympus, Samsung, JVC and others make up the engineering committee working on it.
It’s yet another wireless technology, like Wi-Fi or Bluetooth, but it requires even less power and has even a shorter range—along the lines of one inch.
Yes, I know: an inch? What good is wireless with a range that small?
Once you see the demo, you’ll get it. You bring a camera over to your computer and touch them together—and a whole memory card’s worth of photos are transferred in a few seconds. No wires, software, password, pairing, none of that. Just touch ‘em..."
"...Since Transfer Jet is extremely fast (375 megabits per second), you could also offload videos from your camera or camcorder this way, too. You could also, presumably, touch your cameraphone to a drugstore kiosk to print the pictures on it; touch cellphones to transfer music; and so on."

This short demo by a Toshiba representative at the 2008 CES a few weeks ago shows how cool this could really be.

Of course it'll be a while before the technology is widely available in a wide range of devices across so many vendors, but then it didn't seem to take technologies like Bluetooth and Wifi to take that long to become so ubiquitous and indispensable.  Here's hoping the same goes for Transfer Jet.

Comments

[Alex Tolley]

The potential to eliminate docking connectors alone would make this worthwhile. If the iPOD would use this to connect to car stereo systems, that alone would be a great use case.