Tiny Bluetooth Adapter Leading Micro Revolution?

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The recent Consumer Electronics Show (CES), which was held in Las
Vegas earlier this month, focused enormous media attention on really BIG
subjects, like which vendor was displaying the largest flat-panel television
set.

So it’s odd that one of the most intriguing items I saw announced at the
show was the very smallest.

That device is the MoGo Dapter. (Even its name is reduced in size.) It’s the
world’s smallest Bluetooth adapter — and it suggests a new wave of even smaller
gadgets than the ones we’ve already become used to.

A Bluetooth Adapter That Goes Anywhere

The Dapter (photo, left) is a tiny device that plugs into any standard
USB port. Unlike most USB drives and Bluetooth add-ons, which stick out from a
laptop as much as a human finger would, the Dapter protrudes less than the length
of a fingernail.

The ease with which the mini-gizmo adds Bluetooth support to laptop computers
makes it a welcome entry into the market. The device’s maker — Newton Peripherals of
Natick, Mass. — quotes figures from IMS Research and the Bluetooth Special
Interest Group suggesting that as many as 250 million laptops that lack Bluetooth
capabilities are in use today.

The Dapter, however, may be even more compelling when used with tablets —
portable computers
that are designed to be held in one hand while operated with the other.
A 3-inch Bluetooth adapter sticking out the side of a sleek tablet would
seem ludicrous and might even be dangerous. (I can hear my mother saying,
“You could poke someone’s eye out with that thing!”) The tiny Dapter, by
comparison, would hardly be noticed when plugged into the USB port of
even the most svelte tablets.

The Smallest of the Small

The Dapter defies parallels with competing peripheral devices. It doesn’t look like
any other USB plug-in I can think of. It’s more the size of a cuff link. It makes an iPod Nano seem
bulky.

I’ll try to convey to you the Dapter’s miniscule dimensions by
reciting its specs:

• Only 39 grams in total weight (less than one-tenth of an
ounce).

• About 0.4 inch (1 cm) in total length — only 0.2 inches of
which remain visible outside a USB port when the device is plugged in.

• 38 milliamps of power consumption, maximum, when in use
and 259 microamps (1/4 of one milliamp) when in sleep mode.

With weight and power draw that low, you could leave a Dapter plugged into your
laptop or tablet computer all the time and barely notice that it was there. It
would take months, if not years, for the device to deplete the battery of a
laptop that was, say, sitting unused on a shelf.

The Size of Gadgets to Come

Newton Peripherals is also known for developing the MoGo Mouse, a flat
pointing device that fits into a laptop’s PC Card slot for easy
transportability and rechargeability. (A newer model can be stored inside the
ExpressCard/54 Card slot found on the latest laptops.)

The company’s president and CEO, Matthew Westover, expects that the
miniaturization exhibited by the MoGo Dapter — and, to a lesser extent,
the MoGo Mouse — will influence the design of other tech products.

“We believe the ultra-low profile of the Dapter will become the
standard design for adapters of all kinds,” Westover says.

The company seems to have done a good job of keeping its invention under
wraps. I found it only because I attended Martin Winston’s
Cherry Picks,
a private, new-technology showcase that occurs the day before CES
and is open only to working press. (The Cherry Picks Web page, as if to add to
the mysterious nature of the Dapter, shows a picture of Newton Peripherals’
latest MoGo Mouse but not the company’s tiny new Bluetooth adapter.)

The Dapter is expected to carry a list price of $49.99 (lower at discounters). It should become available in the 2nd quarter of 2007.

More information on the MoGo Dapter and the MoGo Mouse is available at Newton’s

products page.

An Executive Tech update

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