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Portable WiFi--what's the big deal?
May 23, 2006

WiFi for portable devices? That hardly seems surprising. Portability is what WiFi is for. If you don't need portability, wired Ethernet is just fine. (Granted, it's easier to retrofit old buildings with WiFi than with Cat 5 cable.) Laptops are portable, and they come with WiFi. My cell phone has WiFi. And Test & Measurement World ran an article in April 2005 on the test challenges presented by WiFi-enabled cell phones.

So I wondered why my colleague John Dodge, chief editor of Electronic Business, was getting excited over portable WiFi prospects. The answer lies in the class of products that will soon have WiFi capability, as TI WLAN product manager Steve Schnier explains in an interview with Dodge. You can hear it here. Late this year or early next year, Schnier says, digital cameras and, especially, portable media players will come with WiFi connectivity.

Consumers want such products, he says, because digital content is becoming available, and they don't want have to plan ahead what content to download to their portable devices before they hit the road. From an enabling technology standpoint, he says, companies like TI are making chips that offer the necessary high-power computation and low power consumption to add WiFi to handheld products.

These chips, says Schnier, differ from laptop wireless chip sets in that they don't require a laptop-sized battery, and they don't rely on a host PC's processing power. The key metric, he says, is MIPS per megabit per second, which is becoming sufficiently low that portable media players' host processors can focus on their own audio- and video-processing tasks without having to spend much time on managing network connections.

Posted by Rick Nelson on May 23, 2006 | Comments (0)