TROY Group Demonstrates World's First Product for Printing From PCs Across a Bluetooth Wireless Link

TROY Group Inc. (Nasdaq:TROY) today announced that its subsidiary TROY XCD has become the first company to demonstrate a wireless printing connection, allowing a laptop PC to communicate with a printer without cables, using the new Bluetooth(TM) wireless technology.

At the Bluetooth 2000 Congress last week in Monte Carlo, the company successfully sent files from a Sony laptop to a Hewlett-Packard LaserJet without any cable connecting the two devices.

Bluetooth, named for the 10th Century Viking king who united Denmark, is a new low-cost radio technology that is designed to eliminate the need for physical cables to connect a wide range of products, including cellular phones, PCs, headphones, audio equipment, and many more.

It has unprecedented industry support, with over 1,800 companies in the Bluetooth Special Interest Group, including all of the leading players in the telecommunications and computing industries. According to Cahners In-Stat group, the Bluetooth market will grow from 11.5 million units shipped in 2000 to 671.8 million in 2005.

The TROY Group product, which is called the Demonstration and Development Appliance (DDA), is a small box that allows a user to print from any standard Windows application program, such as Microsoft Word, to any parallel or serial printer that is supported by Windows.

By using this DDA product, a user of a Bluetooth-enabled computing device such as a desktop or laptop PC can print a job from anywhere within 10 meters (33.7 feet) of the printer. This capability will be especially convenient for office environments by eliminating the need for printer cables, and for business travelers since they will no longer need to find a cable when they need to print.

"With our new Bluetooth technology, TROY Group is on the leading edge of the exploding market for mobile devices," said Patrick Dirk, TROY's Chairman and CEO. "And unlike many other companies that have demonstrated Bluetooth capabilities on engineering prototypes, we are in the production phase on the DDA, and will be shipping our mass market product to customers by the end of the year. We have designed the DDA to allow wireless device connectivity even at this early stage of the game, in advance of the development of definitive standards."

The initial product is targeted at early Bluetooth adopters, such as original equipment manufacturers (OEMs). It incorporates flash memory, so it can be easily upgraded as Bluetooth standards emerge.


[ Home | Contact | MobiChat | Experts database | Let's do it ]

Comments to the content of this page can be posted on the MobiChat discussion group

logo.gif (1569 bytes)