This Infra Red malarkey

David Dorn acquires a neat Infra Red interface for a desktop computer, and discovers it’s a godsend

These days, there are more and more computing related (and non-computing-related) devices that use Infra Red beams as a method of communication. A quick look around this desk, for instance, shows three mobiles phones (A Nokia, a Sony and a Samsung), one digital camera (an HP unit) a PDA, two printers, a couple of mice – and that’s without even craning my neck!

They can all communicate via those invisible beams – the camera to the printers, the phones to each other and so forth. Until Belkin delivered their neat and unobtrusive  USB-Infrared Smartbeam device to me, though, I’d never had Infra Red available to my desktop – loads of portables, but not the desktop machine.

Now, this is not meant to be a review of the Belkin kit, although if it was I’d be giving it a 9. Rather, it’s something of a revelation to me – and here’s why.

Phones

I’ll freely admit that, although I receive a fair few text messages (SMS), replying to them is something I usually do by voice. The reason? I can’t get away with predictive text and fiddly little keyboards. This IR doohicky, though, allows me to fire up the Samsung software and type the reply on my computer keyboard, and send it via the mobile phone. Much easier!

And then there’s the phonebook on my SIM and in the phones themselves. Neither my adoring and adorable wife nor I ever seem to manage to maintain the entries the way we want, especially for speed dialling. Again, with IR to either my Samsung or her Nokia, we can order the phone books very easily and simply using drag and drop techniques in freely downloadable software.

So, now we each have the speed dials set up the way we want them, and can add to/replace/store our contact numbers very easily, and keep them archived on the PC, just in case we need to change phones, which looks to have something of a savings potential, given what some places charge you to do a phonebook transfer between phones.

Cameras

And then there’s the camera. I usually like to whip the CF card out of my cameras and bung it into a card reader in order to get pics from camera to PC, but I’ve begun using the Infra Red with the HP device, purely because it’s so quick and easy. I haven’t taken to using the IR with a printer thus far – but then there’s little point at the moment.

PDAs

A friend has a PDA that he can never get to synch from its cradle – a problem with IRQs and serial ports that he’s been unable to overcome – yet it just works with the IR adapter. Neat!

And, finally, there’s the emergency modem thing. Our Nokia phones have in-built modems. Ok, they’re not fast, but, in a pinch, I can dial up via the IR and Mobile to check the service reports for the ADSL line before I have to dial the support numbers.

Very handy.

Get more information at www.belkin.co.uk

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David Dorn