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Mad Phone Rules Out Bluetooth While Driving?

It may be Slashdot's worst ever headline - "Car Cellphone Bans Driving Bluetooth" - but what it actually means is significant: it means that the Bluetooth community has been given a power-boost by the need to produce foolproof hands-free systems for car drivers.

The world is, increasingly, banning the use of one-handed driving. Heck, you don't have to restrict it to one-handed: I myself have been in a Florida taxi, where he was not only holding his cellphone in his left hand as he hurtled down the freeway, but was also trying to write down what the person was telling him, on a small post-it note on the dashboard. And he got quite offended when we protested, too.

The Slashdot story refers to a BBC news item with the (only slightly) more comprehensible headline: "Mobile car ban drives Bluetooth" which despite appearances, doesn't predict that mobile cars will be banned. Instead, it says "The UK, in common with other governments around the world, is currently considering a complete ban on using mobile phones in cars. The car manufacturers are responding and Saab is already making a car with Bluetooth built into the dashboard."

Nick Hunn, boss of Bluetooth specialist company TDK Grey Cell, points out the problem with this: it takes a very long time to design a new feature into a car, and this feature is likely to stay as "only luxury" for some time.

The problem, however, isn't just the car design cycle, which takes years, not months. It's also the fact that Bluetooth is making a considerable effort to stabilise the design, so that it gets adopted, and the current spec won't easily allow the phone maker to do what is really wanted - make the switch from pocket phone to car phone seamlessly.

Currently, there are "profiles" for Bluetooth. There is a standard hands-free audio headset profile, which is what you get with most first-generation Bluetooth phones. You connect the two devices to each other with an arcane ritual called "discovery" and match them. After that, if the Bluetooth headset is switched on and Bluetooth is enabled in the phone, you can use the headset any time you like.

But there is also a car-phone profile and a hands-free profile; and what isn't easy - at all - is to switch from using your headset with your pocket phone, to using it with the same phone plugged into the car, or connected to the car's Bluetooth. It's like doing a system rollback in Windows XP or with GoBack; perfectly simply to do if you've done it several times before, understand what you're trying to do, and if you don't screw it up. But for most users, it's probably something they hope they never have to try.

Exactly how useful hands-free phones will be without really good voice-controlled dialling, is hard to guess. WildFire, the company which Orange bought because it provided an automated "secretary" built into the network, is supposedly able to cope with noisy environments. You say "Wildfire!" and a sexy lady (or whatever you prefer) responds and takes commands.

But she's a robot. She's also about as intelligent as Huxley's Epsilon Semi-Moron lift operator, and despite an interesting demo of the new version (for business users) just being launched in the UK, my feeling is that she's more likely to drive the driver nuts, than to prevent accidents.

And - as one of the slashdotters has observed - it isn't just a question of whether you're holding the phone while driving. In studies it has been pretty convincingly demonstrated that talking to the driver distracts them.

So no, this isn't going to transform idiots into safe drivers. But it will put a pin in the bums of some of the Bluetooth SIG members and hopefully, get this "profile" issue resolved more rapidly than it would otherwise have been.

Of course, last week's UnPlugFest in Spain, where Bluetooth developers "unplug things into each other" wirelessly and see if they work, may have been a splendid triumph. And all our worries may be over already! Then again ...