All Three? Gee!

If you take all the buzzwords away and get down to what wireless really means to its users, one idea keeps popping up: multitasking.

Sure, it sounds like execu-speak, but the word applies to everyday life as well. Using wireless to touch base with the office on the way to a meeting — that's multitasking. Rendezvousing with friends once you've started a night out on the town — multitasking. Calling the wife to see if there's anything she needs since you're already out — multitasking. You get the picture.

Now Texas Instruments has presented a product design that takes multitasking one step further. WANDA, short for Wireless Any Network Digital Assistant, is a concept design that combines wireless voice, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth capability. WANDA users will be able employ all three capabilities at the same time — for example, talking on a cell phone while Web-browsing over Wi-Fi while conducting business via Bluetooth. It's a true wireless trifecta.

As a concept design, WANDA provides a ready-made blueprint for devices, complete with software and hardware. The main responsibility of product manufacturers will be to design the outer shell of the device. The size of this blueprint (117 × 74 × 20 millimeters) pretty clearly limits WANDA to the PDA environment, and its first incarnation — designed for GSM/GPRS voice — runs on Microsoft's Pocket PC operating system. Later versions will run on different OSs and use different voice standards.

TI was able to work three functions into one device in probably the simplest way possible: one chip for each. Sticking three chips in a PDA was the easy part, according to Jeff Wender, strategic alliance marketing manager for TI. The real challenge was getting them to work together. “What really makes it work is the fabric that we used to put all of these products together, combined with a software that allows these products to work efficiently,” he said.

A big challenge was getting Bluetooth and Wi-Fi to work together. Because they run over the same unlicensed spectrum, interference has been a problem. According to Wender, TI overcame that via software that forces the two standards to play nice.

Squeezing three of the hottest wireless capabilities onto one device is undoubtedly cool. But is it necessary at this stage in the game? “The question you have to ask is, is this a technology without a market?” said John Jackson, an analyst with The Yankee Group. “Do we have WAN/LAN roaming yet? How evolved is the service environment really? You have operators all throwing hats into the Wi-Fi ring, but it's still the Wild West.”

Jackson conceded, however, that putting the WANDA concept design out on the market does give TI a first-mover advantage, and that the trend of designing both the hardware and software of a product makes life much easier on manufacturers.

Still, wireless won't see heavy demand for products like WANDA until providers — not the manufacturers and product designers — learn how to make the technologies work together. “You need to keep your eye on what the operators do with wireless LANs, and what sort of service environment materializes around offloading WAN capacity to the LAN,” Jackson said. “That is really the linchpin.”