The announcement was one of a broad range of new products and technologies unveiled by Carly Firorina, HP chair and CEO, in her keynote speech at ITU Telecom Conference here Sunday (Oct. 12). Fiorina said that HP is committed to "driving innovations in all aspects of mobility" and "accelerating the task of taking the next wave of mobility mainstream."

Nokia is the first mobile handset vendor to leverage HP's platform, enabling users of Nokia's series 60 imaging phones ¡ª including Nokia 3650, 6600 and 7650 Bluetooth mobile phones ¡ª to wirelessly print photos, multimedia message services (MMS) messages with images, e-mails and others to HP printers, without connecting to a PC.

Simultaneously, HP unveiled a Bluetooth-enabled dongle for printers, in an effort to make HP's installed base of 300 million printers Bluetooth-capable.

HP's move is a big boost for Bluetooth proponents, as it adds a clear value ¡ª useful application ¡ª to users of Bluetooth-enabled devices. Maria Khorsand, CEO of Ericsson Technology Licensing, said, "As the cost of Bluetooth devices go down and Bluetooth-equipped products proliferate on the market, it's time to focus on users."

For HP, which was one of the first companies to incorporate Bluetooth in its PDAs, called iPAQ, and to develop a similar PDA/printer application, targeting camera phones for wireless printing applications "were natural extension to what we already do," said Dan Shine, marketing director, mobility program office, office of strategy and technology at HP.

Dilip Phadke, director of business relations and development, corporate and global accounts at HP, said, "We believe in mobility, we believe in Bluetooth, and we've established a strong relationship with Nokia."

HP's new software handles everything from image formatting and image manipulation and layouts and high quality printing. The software platform is scalable, "so that we are ready for printing high resolution pictures taken by new multi-megapixel cameraphones," said Phadke.

HP and Ericsson Technology Licensing have worked together to define the size of software, including a required memory footprint, and all the features essential to make Bluetooth-based wireless mobile phone/printer applications possible. Because the HP mobile phone printing platform places most of the image-rendering burden on the printer, it will be "unintrusive" to mobile handset designs, said HP's Phadke.

The memory requirements are 250 Kbytes for the application footprint, according to the company.

Because the mobile phone printing software is based on the Bluetooth spec and its Basic Print Profile, mobile handset vendors and printer manufacturers interested in enabling similar features can either develop their own application software, or "they can talk to us," said HP's Phadke.

HP owns the IP for its new software, and it is available for licensing. The company, however, declined to comment on the terms of licensing. "We will establish business relationships based on IP," said Phadke.

HP's mobile phone printing software was designed for Nokia's Series 60 platform. It remains unclear whether the same HP software can seamlessly run on handsets developed by other Series 60 licensees such as Siemens or Infineon. "We are currently running compatibility testing among other phones," said Phadke.

During the CEO's keynote, HP announced a host of new products including new HP printers with Bluetooth and WiFi capability, new HP iPAQ Pocket PCs that are also WiFi- and Bluetooth-enabled, the new HP Tablet PC with Intel's Centrino technology and also enabled for Bluetooth and WiFi, and other new products.

Additionally, HP and Ericsson said that they are cooperating to drive mass market adoption of Bluetooth-enabled mobile devices. Under the new agreement between the two companies, HP will get access to Ericsson's entire Bluetooth portfolio, including IP and software, based on the Bluetooth version 1.2 spec. HP said that it will combine licensed Bluetooth wireless technology from Ericsson with many of its own consumer wireless devices.

By: DocMemory
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