I've been playing with bluetooth this weekend. It's a "standard" that's been around for a few years and is more popular in Europe. It is a wireless connection, slower than 802.11anything, but it does a good job of allowing devices to "discover" each other.
This discovery idea has been around awhile. Sun announced something a couple years ago that was like java only for devices. Stop in a motel, turn on your PC, viola, you see the motel's fax machine, etc.
The speed of the connection is around 200-400Kbps, not fast, but plenty fast enough to synch a PDA with a PC or a .....gasp....mobile phone.
What I played with was a new Sony PDA and a Bluetooth USB adaptor from Belkin. There were some ugly setup problems, but after four hours of HE-double toothpicks, it works. I can synch the PDA with my laptop or my desktop in 20 or 30 seconds. And I know it will work with mobile phones because we tried it last week with Peter Sohal's (our Zen Master of Marketing) cell phone (an Erickson, I think). I beamed Peter a memo and his phone received it immediately.
Each connection can be protected, by encryption, and by password. When devices discover each other, they will ask to authenticate each other with a password.
It isn't sublime, but it is pretty good.
Also this week, Best Buy, CompUSA, and Micro Center all have the new 802.11g routers and PC Cards at about $150 and $100, respectively. 54Mbps, I think. And they support 802.11b, the older 11Mbps standard.
And I read somewhere that there is a documentary tonight on the Discover channel on the construction of the Great Pyramid in Egypt.
I wish I could afford cable.