Tools of the road to help you go hands-free

Suzanne Choney • E-mail

Welcome, California and Washington, to Version 2.0 of driving and talking on the cell phone.

Remember your first day of school, when you didn't know if you could walk in the classroom without trembling, and you worried about whether you'd make the grade? Today is going to be a little bit like that, because today you have to get in your vehicles and drive without holding a cell phone in your hands. It's the law now.

A funny-sounding technology called Bluetooth will help you achieve this. But if you haven't tried it out yet, today is not the day to practice. Try it out when you're parked somewhere, or in your driveway at home. Use it when you're confident and comfortable with the technology, and if you're not — don't test it out while you're behind the wheel. 

Bluetooth is much-improved from its early days 10 years ago. But, for initial setup, it still requires some dexterity and patience — qualities that are key for good driving, so save your concentration for that.

Drivers in New York, Connecticut, New Jersey and Washington, D.C., have been living for awhile with handheld cell phone bans, and there are a growing number of Bluetooth hands-free devices that can help.

Plantronics' Discovery 925 Bluetooth Headset ($150) has a distinctive V-shaped design.

They include headsets as well as speakerphones for those who don’t want to fuss with an earpiece. Also, Ford, in conjunction with Microsoft, offers Bluetooth connections as a built-in option on various Ford, Lincoln and Mercury models. (Msnbc.com is a joint venture of Microsoft and NBC Universal).

Most of you, however, aren’t likely to run out and get a new car to comply with the new laws.

Bluetooth car speakerphones are a booming market, so to speak. In 2007, the Bluetooth aftermarket, including car speakerphones and GPS units was around 25 million units, a 54 percent increase from 2006, according to IMS Research.

Check for Bluetooth
The first thing to do is make sure you have a phone that has a Bluetooth chip in it to communicate with a headset or speakerphone. Most current cell phones are Bluetooth-enabled.

“The penetration rate of Bluetooth in cell phones is huge,” said Douglas McEuen, ABI Research’s senior analyst for wireless semiconductors. “We’re estimating that worldwide, the 2008 market for cellular handsets is going to be close to 1.2 billion units, and over half of those will have will have Bluetooth capability. The volume of it is just enormous.”

But not everyone who has the technology uses it. “There’s a large percentage of people who aren’t activating or using their Bluetooth,” McEuen said.

“It might be because some people are still learning about the technology, but also some of them haven’t been forced to use it” in places where there are no restrictions on driving while talking on a cell phone.

Bluetooth lets devices within a 33-foot range connect to each other without wires. In order for that to happen, both devices need to have some initial set-up and then need to be “paired” to communicate with each other.

The pairing process has improved over the years, but can still be a frustrating experience, especially if you’re among two-thirds of the market using a phone that has a specification known as Bluetooth 1.1 or 1.2.

Phones that have the more recent Bluetooth specification of 2.0 or 2.1 generally are easier to set up and to pair. To find out what you have, check your phone’s menu for information, the manual or the manufacturer’s Web site.

“We’ll definitely see the 2.0 and 2.1 specifications becoming the dominant version of Bluetooth by 2010,” said McEuen.

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