A team of 27 researchers and students at the Melbourne University recently unveiled their new GiFi chip, which they hope will be ready for market in 2009. The chip, which measures 5mm on either side, only uses 2 watts of power and sports a tiny 1mm antenna. Since this little chip is manufactured using CMOS (complementary metal-oxide semiconductor) technology, it will cost about $10 to manufacture, as well.
Using the 60GHz frequency, GiFi would be capable of data transfer speeds up to 5Gb over a 10 meter radius. This is like super-powered Bluetooth, here. Possible uses would be a video kiosk, which could send a full-length high-definition movie to your phone over GiFi in a matter of seconds, and then you could stream that to your TV once you got home, or transfer it to your PC for later viewing. The possibilities seem pretty endless.
Via: Phonescoop
These exciting new technologies never get their full potential realised anyway so whilst it sounds genius it’ll probably be rendered useless by companies who are too afraid to jump on the bandwagon.
Bluetooth itself was hypothesised to be ‘the next big thing’ and engineers spoke of a future whereby your cooker would know when your car was driving down the road, so it could turn itself on ready for when you arrive etc and it ias since become a lame duck. apart from the odd fancy (but pointless) peripheral its not really doin a lot more than infra-red already does.
I use my bluetooth about once a week and even them its just for sending stupid pictures and videos to friends. Hardly a solution to any significant task. I’m not saying its useless entirely but its potential hasn’t been reached due to too little creativity in the electronics industry and GiFi will likely in the same way.
Sorry about the rant. 🙂