Wine Collector 150 with Bluetooth announced
By Donald Melanson 
posted October 7th 2005 4:30AM
posted October 7th 2005 4:30AM
Intelliscanner, manufacturer of various scanning-related devices, announced the Wine Collector 150, a
Bluetooth-equipped barcode scanner with included wine management software for Windows or Mac OS X. Upon scanning the
barcode on a bottle of wine, the software will auotmatically fill in the name, varietal, winery, country, type, color,
and region. Presumably it'll also let you fill in that information yourself, since it seems to us that the wine most
worth collecting won't have barcodes. The Bluetooth model will set you back a hefty $300 US, with a less déclassé USB
version also available for $200.
[Via MacMinute]
wine without barcodes? pshhh, yeah right--engadget, quit pulling me leg!
Not to be a grammar nazi - but you probably meant more d?ass?non?
Many respectable bottles of wine (and fine liquors) have bar codes. Or have you not noticed? I just looked at a few bottles in my collection and only 1 did not have a bar code. Even if the winery does not put a bar code on it, the distributor will.
Assuming that wine collectors would also be interested in collecting rare scotch whiskey tto, and then adding the fact that several of those bottles would be older than 30 years, it's quite possible to have bottles with no bar codes.
Don't you mean a more d?ass?SB version?
With Wine Collector, if there's no barcode on the item, you can add the item by hand, then optionally put an asset tag on it with a unique barcode value. It won't fill in the details for you, but it'll let you track it as part of your collection and scan it out later if you put a tag on it.
Weren't they just giving these things away a few years ago? And $100 for bluetooth? Crikey!
This is a Flic bluetooth scanner which is a very very good unit. I picked up the same scanner (OEM'd by NCR actually) for a lot less than anyone sells them for secondhand. You can sometimes find them on eBay.
The flic bluetooth scanners seem overpriced (especially when you actually look at the difference between the serial-only and bluetooth models (there is small PCB with a single IC in the battery door on the bluetooth model) but they really are worth the money. 3 AAA batteries will last for years in the thing. They use an ingenious mecahnical mechanism for oscillating the mirror -- when you depress the scan button the mechanical energy you impart does the work a small electric motor or other osicllator would normally do. All the scanner has to do is power the laser LED and the receiving electronics.
Neat tech!
Although I must say that trying to catalog a collection of wine (really good wine, really old wine, or foreign wines in particular) would almost negate tne supposed time savings of this device for this purpose. You really want to be able to identify individual bottles in your collection and a UPC wont let you do this... so if you have to stick your own identifier on each bottle anyway, why go to the trouble of a bluetooth scanner to look them up? For that matter why go to the trouble of labelling each bottle when you could just identify them by their location in your racks by row and column (you do store your extensive collection in a proper cellar, don't you?)
I was just about to mention that that was a FLIC scanner. They are indeed cute units. Wish they had put more ram in them.
And this might be most helpful for insurance purposes. Also you don't need to track individual bottles. Who really cares that you have bottle 1 of this and bottle 2 of the same thing. Better to just know how much you have. Restuarants and Catering services would probably make decent use of them.