The recent Bluetooth Congress and Exhibition in Amsterdam was more upbeat than previous events, and the Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG) seems confident that the long-forecast take-off of Bluetooth products is about to happen.

The growing maturity of Bluetooth was illustrated by the fact that those attending the congress were talking about applications and user needs rather than the technology. A much-quoted phrase was that people want "things that do things".

One noticeable difference this year was the larger number of vendors and products at the show. Over 640 Bluetooth products have now passed the qualification tests and the exhibition boasted over 120 exhibitors.

At the congress, the Bluetooth SIG and the GSM Association announced a collaboration to educate each other's members and the public about the synergies between Bluetooth devices and mobile phones. This is important because most users' first experience of Bluetooth in action will probably be through the menus and manuals of their mobile phone handsets.

UK vendors appear to be playing a leading role in many areas of Bluetooth technology. Cambridge Silicon Radio (CSR) makes Bluetooth chips that are used in more products than those from any other supplier. CSR is supplying chips for Microsoft's forthcoming Bluetooth keyboard and mouse.

Many PC manufacturers are also now including Bluetooth modules on their motherboards, and most of these use CSR technology, according to the company. CSR said it is also working with a wireless LAN (WLAN) firm to produce a reference design for a dual-capable Bluetooth and 802.11b WLAN product.

Red-M said it is now shipping products in significant numbers, most notably having clinched an order from BT for thousands of access points.

Norwood Systems won last year's award for the best business product. Its EnterpriseMobility system has matured since then and now allows users of Bluetooth voice or data mobiles to roam around networks of access points that may be spread over multiple locations.

Commtag, a new company based in Cambridge, specialises in enabling mobile networks for business applications. Its first product, called Duality and shipping now, is an always-on email system for the Pocket PC, which uses Bluetooth and a GPRS phone to provide a link to a corporate Microsoft Exchange server. This is similar in concept to the BlackBerry email client, but is more flexible. It will soon be available for other platforms, such as Palm and Symbian, and will work with many Bluetooth-enabled handsets. Commtag is now working with both Red-M and Norwood Systems to provide extra support for its products on their networks.

One innovation at this year's Congress was an exhibition stand where visitors could purchase Bluetooth products. It was operated by Blueunplugged, an online retailer based in Liverpool that claims to sell every commercial Bluetooth product currently available.

It seems likely that mobile phones will drive the Bluetooth market and there are indications that Bluetooth capability will soon move down from high-end phones to the mid-range, and will later appear in entry-level models. There are now few technical obstacles to the success of Bluetooth.

However, analysts say the SIG and Bluetooth vendors should be careful in the way they market the products to avoid creating unreasonable expectations - especially after the disappointment of Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) technology.

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