Bluetooth is a wireless Personal Area Networking (PAN) technology that allows devices to connect in a range of 33 feet (10 meters) or more depending on the radio's strength.Bluetooth, abbreviated as BT here, uses a wireless radio to transmit data and operates in the 2.4 gigahertz spectrum, as does WiFi.Bluetooth enabled phones are more common in Asia and Europe.Bluetooth 1.1 devices communicate at a maximum of 1 meg/second. . . considerably slower than WiFi, but more than fast enough to pump the relatively slow data feed that comes from your cell phone. BT CF cards and PC cards tend to be very similar in size and power consumption across brands.

If you have a Bluetooth enabled PDA, you can surf the Internet and check/send emails. How? There are a few ways:

1. Your PDA can bond with a BT enabled mobile phone and use the phone as a wireless modem.

2. You can connect via BT to your PC that's equipped with a USB or PCMCIA Bluetooth card and use the pass-through Internet connection feature of Windows networking to share the connection with your PDA.

3. You can purchase a BT access points. BT access points work just like WiFi access points, broadcasting a wireless Internet connection to PDAs and computers equipped with BT. Access points typically have higher range, which means you can be ~50 feet away from the access point or even more depending on walls in your environment.

4. You can buy an external wired modem with BT that connects to a phone jack for dialup Internet access, and connect to that modem using your PDA and BT.

You can tell your base station who's allowed to connect and who isn't. If a hacker is using a wireless network device to listen in on your traffic and she's good at hacking, she might be able to intercept and read your data as it's transmitted over the air. However, she'd had to be within range of your network, yet manage to not be noticed by others. Not all that easy, after all. However, if you're setting up a WiFi network in a corporate environment, take care that additional security measures are used whenever sensitive data is being transmitted over the airwaves!

Right now, there are cell phones, PC cards, CompactFlash cards, printer modules, access points (that serve and route Internet connections to BT clients like your PDA), the iPAQ BT models, Sony Clié NZ90 and TG50, Palm SD Bluetooth card, Palm Tungsten T line of PDAs, USB adapters, the HP 995c printer, headsets, and some notebooks from Sony, Toshiba and IBM with Bluetooth. In the coming years, expect to see more computer and consumer devices with built-in BT.