Ozmo's WiFi PAN mouse cuts the wires and the Bluetooth

We've never really had anything bad to say about our Bluetooth mouse experience (this week, at least), but Ozmo thinks it can do better. The company has built an optical mouse that connects over low-power WiFI Personal Area Network (PAN) technology. Ozmo has special drivers for the PC to allow it to do concurrent WLAN and WPAN connections, and is compatible with 802.11g and 802.11a. They're also fighting Bluetooth on the audio front with a headset, where we think they might find a more welcome reception -- especially when they get some good stereo headphones on the market. Intel and Ozmo just recently trotted out this WiFI PAN tech a couple of months ago, and what we have here are reference designs for use by OEMs, so no word on commercial availability just yet.

[Via I4U]

[KarlW @ Aug 18th 2008 9:40AM]

The best thing about Bluetooth is that it uses profiles - standard ways devices communicate with each other, to avoid needing drivers for each and every device. Lots of USB devices do the same thing (USB mice, storage devices, etc don't need drivers). Hopefully WiFi PAN doesn't scrap this idea.

[olly @ Aug 18th 2008 9:50AM]

I'm not too clued up on this sort of tech, but could the audio side be used with the iPod Touch?

[Skyride @ Aug 18th 2008 10:32AM]

Well with a software update on apples part, theres no reason it couldn't.

[EMoShunz @ Aug 18th 2008 10:00AM]

so, if you're running a draft n network, and you add this mouse, would it not slow down the whole thing to g?

[Skyride @ Aug 18th 2008 10:30AM]

Well I'd assume if this got popular, they would start putting multiple wifi radios in laptops and set it up so that one is used for wifi and the other is set aside for PAN.

[Mike @ Aug 18th 2008 11:45AM]

No, it wouldn't. If you have a draft-n router it should be able to support n, g, and b all at the same time.

and please, if you're considering getting anything draft-n, stick with d-link.

[Jamie @ Aug 18th 2008 10:04AM]

wow, is their really a need for this? Bluetooth is a pretty decent personal area network already. Using 802.11 and the TCP/IP stack seems to be overkill. KVMoE notwithstanding, why would you want to extend the range of such peripherals? To me, this would only invite a security hole. At least with bluetooth, your peripherals are within reach/vision and the setup is just simple enough to get up and running while providing some security measures to keep your machine from being pwned. Plus, can you say waste of IP address.

Seriously, I've seen a lot of dumb technology exposed by Engadget and I wish it would stop (being created, that is, not being covered by Engadget)

[Chuckles McGee @ Aug 18th 2008 10:16AM]

Bluetooth: U HAS 2 PAI US TEH ROYALTIEZ 2 USE BLUETOOTH
Ozmo: O RLY?
Bluetooth: YEZ
Ozmo:DEN ILL JUS MAK MAH OWN STANDARD!!!11!!

[deyanimay @ Aug 18th 2008 10:05AM]

This connects directly to the computers wlan card or to through the router?

[cvk @ Aug 18th 2008 10:57AM]

Directly to the wireless interface on the computer. Going through the router introduces too much delay and things like mice would be hard to use because of the lag. WPAN via 802.11 has two problems to address: how to talk directly to the computer without interfering with computer-router net traffic, and the power consumption problem. Ozmo has answers for both, they claim. In fact they say their WiFi PAN solution consumes much less power than even Bluetooth. It'll be interesting to see where this goes; Bluetooth is really well established in phones, GPS devices, and peripherals, and will be hard to unseat no matter how much better a new solution is.

[crsh @ Aug 18th 2008 10:32AM]

Wifi for peripherals? What's next, eSATA inkjet printers?

[r3loaded @ Aug 18th 2008 11:04AM]

Absolutely. Who doesn't want to print at 3Gbps?

Lol, imagine how fast the paper would be flying out if a printer could print so much data that quickly!

[UNKN @ Aug 18th 2008 11:13AM]

Imagine the paper cuts from such printing speed, think of the children!

[Eric @ Aug 18th 2008 10:32AM]

Okay, USB 2.0 isn't good enough? We need more traffic on WiFi? And I think EMoShunz is right. If you put a slower peripheral on an 802.11n network, everything gets slowed down.

Can you say boondoggle?

[Sam @ Aug 18th 2008 11:06AM]

Hopefully this technology will make it easier to share wireless devices between computers. I'd love to have a keyboard/mouse that with a single button switches between phone/laptop/desktop. With more phones starting to support wifi this could be feasible. But then again there is no technical reason Bluetooth couldn't do this (or more likely some devices already do).

What Wi-Fi PAN really needs to take off isn't so much the hardware, thats been done. What it really needs is cross platform drivers with a well designed software stack such that the vast majority of devices don't need vendor specific drivers. Perhaps an extra layer of abstraction that allows programs to access these devices in terms of exchanging high level objects, alleviating the pain of writing platform dependant device interfaces. This layer would completely encapsulate the sharing of devices.

[Mr Haarg @ Aug 18th 2008 11:13AM]

EMoShunz guess right!

Anyway, could www.Haarg.com be another way to communicate?

[andres @ Aug 18th 2008 12:38PM]

no

[Mr. E @ Aug 18th 2008 12:08PM]

So I see mention of USB 2.0, but maybe that isn't fast enough. That is why they (Intel & Partners) are coming out with USB 3.0. Because your right, USB 2.0 isn't fast enough. That should help kill off this useless WPAN.

[John @ Aug 18th 2008 12:40PM]

Uh... USB 2.0 is fast enough for mice... it's not like you're doing such crazy things with it that there's going to be hundred of megs per second of movement/click data