Sony ships chips for 560Mb/s Bluetooth beater

Just what we need.

Yep, we really needed another short-range wireless standard to join Bluetooth, 802.11, 802.15.4/ZigBee, UWB et al. On the up side at least they've kept away from 2.4Ghz.

Do want

Actually I do want this. Combined with an SD card and powered by, presumably, magic, I can see this as a very nifty "physical cut-and-paste" tool. Like a USB stick but without all the faffing around through dialog boxes, unmounting, etc.

"Select + waft" could mean "copy" and "nothing selected + waft" could mean "paste".

Super duper.

Huh?

Perhaps there just isn't enough information here on el reg, but this doesn't seem terribly useful for transfering much more than electronic business cards.

I have two Sony laptops and I'd be hard pressed just to get their internal wireless cards within 3 cm of each other. I'm sure other devices would be even worse. Most electronic devices tend to be close to 3cm at their thinnest point, leaving little room for error when trying to position them for pairing. Perhaps they're just expecting them to be used in SD card slots, so they're always on the outside of the device.

And then, do I have to keep them there until the transfer finishes? Kinda defeats the point of having a high transfer rate then. If I'm sending something from my mobile phone to my friend's, do we have to stand there hugging the entire time the transfer is going on just to keep the signal intact?

If so, it's certainly reasonable to expect there won't be any security issues... Noone else will get a significant signal to decode.

If this has the range of Bluetooth or wifi, then it sounds like it would be pretty good, but at 3cm it's basically worthless. Either way, it sounds like someone needs to rethink something about those chips.

So good they backed it twice....??

Canon are backing this twice then, huh!?! LOL

Why would this have any use at all, if you need to have devices within 3cm of each other - the relatively short range of Bluetooth makes it unwieldy enough and this won't help matters much.....it's nearly as useful as infrared :-)

Sony proprietary standard != standard

I keep getting the impression part of Sony's business model is to be something like almost a patent troll, aiming to control the underlying technology "standard" that everyone else uses. That way everyone else pays Sony for the technology and Sony controls the evolution of the technology.

So how much does it cost hardware companies to be part of the TransferJet club? ... I'm guessing once they buy the Sony TransferJet chips, Sony gives them a "free" license to use the Sony chips any way they wish. Problem is, if you are a chip manufacturer, then you need to buy a license from Sony to make TransferJet chips. So Sony corners the chip market and earns out of every chip sold. In a way, they tax every TransferJet product their competitors produce.

We need truly open standards, not Sony proprietary (do you want a "free" license to sell Sony chips for Sony) non-standards.

Cpt Bill

Sounds to me like an excellent way to push another generation of psp & ps3, along with other hardware. They would really corner the market if only they would release a firmware update for ps3 to allow the cell to convert media formats to guarantee compatability.

Can't wait to replace my bluetooth headset!

Oh! But I'll have to hold the phone 3cm from the headset! Never mind.