Rupert Goodwins' Diary

Wednesday 26/09/2001

More HP'ing today - typical, that. I don't speak to them for months, and then two in quick succession. This time it's nowhere near as jammy: an hour in a room in a Central London office listening to a Top Research Bod talk about Bluetooth, then an hour in the basement listening to a trio of marketing men talk about laptops and printers. And Bluetooth. HP likes Bluetooth.

The technical talk is interesting. It turns out that 802.11b and Bluetooth work quite well together -- later, we're to see a laptop equipped with both - and that it's important to make sure the seals on your microwave oven door are kept spick and span. Otherwise huge, banana-shaped swoops of radio energy escape while you're warming up your pizza and beat up the poor little Bluetooth bits. Cleanliness is next to throughput, you know.

I have to admit I haven't been keeping an eye on inkjet technology for a year or so, and the progress has been just as amazing as the drop in prices. HP's patent system for mixing thousands of colours in a 5-picolitre drop of ink and then blasting it out at high precision is nothing short of science fiction - and you can get it for next to nothing. Eee, I remember the days when a nine-pin dot matrix printer was the bee's knees and NLQ was something to be proud of. Tell kids of today that...