Rupert Goodwins' Diary

Monday 20/08/2001

Sometimes, even the mighty Sony can create a tiny, bejewelled stick of great beauty and utility only to pick up the wrong end. As part of the company's sustained assault on the Bluetooth naysayers, the company has put the wireless technology into two camcorders. Now, this is exactly the sort of thing that's supposed to be happening -- even if Bluetooth is a tad too slow to make it much good for transferring entire movies, it's grand for stills and small clips of the sort you'd just love to email back home from your hols, the house you're looking at or the scene of the crime. The lack of Bluetooth-enabled phones is a bit sad, but one has to start somewhere.

So, is this the main use Sony envisage for the new technology? Er, no. We are informed that what the company really thinks will happen is that owners will gleefully grab their cameras, stick eyeball to LCD and start browsing the Web. Which will really impress those back home if you press the wrong button while taking pictures of herds of wildebeests sweeping majestically across the veldt, recording instead the ZDNet UK front page. And the potential for hilarious embarrassment when showing gran the home movies goes far beyond anything you might experience through forgetting to clean out the cache on the home PC.

Nice try, Sony. But can we just stick to taking pictures? (Obscure Fact: King Bluetooth was so named because he had an enormous fondness for gnasher-staining blueberries.)