When Brainboxes attended the Bluetooth Unplugfest in Sofia, France recently it was exciting to see the progress that all companies have made towards final release of products. Gavin Jewell, Brainboxes Research and Development manager said “The Unplugfest provided an excellent opportunity for us to test our Bluetooth software stack implementation with other companies’ products. We see these events as key to ensuring the interoperability of Brain Boxes products and this particular event was a great success for the Brainboxes development team”.

Brainboxes have been focussed on making the best choices from the beginning of our Bluetooth development and this was highlighted by a recent article in the Bluetooth e-magazine INCISOR which clearly vindicates our selection of Cambridge Silicon Radio as our Bluetooth chip supplier: ”Brainboxes designed its Bluetooth products around CSR’s Bluecore Solution whether through excellent judgment or just good luck one can‘t say but the choice of CSR means that Brainboxes will be one of the first companies to ship. Veritably a triumph for British Company collaboration” INCISOR magazine, August 2000.

Like other companies, there have been certain delays which mean that we have not supplied products quite as early as initially predicted. These delays are attributed to a number of factors listed below:

Qualification process – Brainboxes are determined to be one of the first companies in the world to have our products fully Bluetooth qualified, and this inevitably takes time. The qualification process has only been relatively recently finalised and is more labour intensive than was initially thought.

Component shortages – the mobile phone market is still experiencing enormous growth rates and this has led to a shortage of key electronics components worldwide and has given us much longer lead times on components for our Bluetooth products

Bluetooth chips – The Bluetooth chips we are using were originally scheduled for delivery to Brainboxes during the first few days in July. This date is now the beginning of October.

We currently anticipate supplying beta products from October onwards, with final release December/January 2000.