LONDON — Imagine the scene. You’re walking through a crowded shopping centre on a Saturday afternoon and your cell phone bleeps. You get your phone out and read the screenNULL”Umm, nice shoes, buddy!”

“Who sent that?” you wonder frantically, while gazing paranoically at your shiny new loafers. You click to see who the message came from, but no number shows up.

Then another message comes through. It says: “Ha, ha! Congratulations! You’ve just been Bluejacked.” At this point, if you scan 360 degrees, you might just see two or more teenagers running away in hysterics.

The ability to be confused with intrusive, anonymous texts from pesky kids is one of the dubious advantages of having a cell phone enabled with Bluetooth, the short-wave radio technology.

The technology allows the sender’s phone to search for other Bluetooth-enabled devices within a range of about 10 metres and send messages to all other devices that have the technology switched on. For kids, who know more about how this stuff works than you, Bluejacking is the modern version of knocking on doors and running away, offering a similar degree of frisson with less risk of getting caught. It’s a growing craze.

Some more sinister types are using the technology to peep into the contacts books in other people’s mobiles. Some tech-savvy adults are even putting the “Blue” back into “Bluejacking” by using anonymous texts to engineer brief encounters with strangers on trains.

Sadly for cell-phone operators, none of these phenomena offers any revenue because all of this mischief can be made for free over short distances between devices, without the need to use the operator’s own network.

It is just one reason why Bluetooth has had its day as a developing technology.

Earlier this month Ericsson revealed that it was to stop developing new chip designs using Bluetooth. It’s a significant move because the Swedish mobile giant invented the standard just a decade ago.

It named it after the 10th century Danish King Harald Bluetooth who ended generations of national strife by uniting the country and turning it to Christianity.

In the early days Ericsson had similarly crusading hopes for the new technology and hyped it to high heaven. Bluetooth was going to free us from the garish snake-pit of wires that ran around our homes connecting our various electronic devices — TVs, video players, computers, printers, stereos, speakers.

Unfortunately, the club that Ericsson formed with other companies to develop the technology didn’t bother to do much work on standardization and thus left gaps in the standard for manufacturers to fill in.

The electronics giants couldn’t agree how to fill them and so most Bluetooth gizmos, such as wireless speakers and computer keyboards failed to take off. Little wonder that the wirelessly networked home remains a pipe dream for most of us.

Bluetooth’s biggest success came by accident as a result of legislation banning the use of handheld mobiles in the car. It led to a rush for Bluetooth hands-free kits and headsets.

However, car-makers remain unhappy with the Bluetooth community, which has been unable to develop the technology further to allow reliable synchronization between car kits and handsets for applications such as phone directory.

But despite Ericsson’s decision not to develop the technology further, other supporters remain convinced that Bluetooth can still change our lives. Chief among them is BT. Along with Vodafone and Motorola it is trying to develop a product called the Bluephone: a mobile that, when used in the home, uses short-wave radio to connect automatically to the home phone line, offering cheaper calls.

It could just be the product that helps BT to offset the plunging revenues in its traditional businesses. But don’t bet on it. Mobile operator MmO2 did trials with a similar service and encountered several problems, not least that its version couldn’t work through walls.

Little wonder then that BT has quietly put the project back several months.

© The Vancouver Sun 2004