I’ve got a bunch of old laptops and many of them have IRDA ports. I’ve never seen a peripheral that uses them. Are they for data transfer between machines? How do you use them?
I use mine to synchronise my contacts & calendar between my phone and Outlook. Essentially it’s no different to what I could do by plugging the phone in with its USB cable, it’s just less hassle, only having to put it on the desk beside the computer. I’ve also occassionally used it to transfer files (ringtones etc) between phones, but only when there was some problem with using Bluetooth.
I used the one on my laptop to sync my cell phone and PDA in the days before bluetooth. You can also buy an IR media center remote control.
They’re pretty much obsolete now. The bandwidth and range is much to low. Bluetooth wins for the moment.
In its heyday, IrDA was going to be the ideal way to do things like walk up to a IrDA-enabled printer and squirt stuff across to be printed without needing to plug in. I suppose that might be useful if you’re traveling and wanted to print something at a client’s office, but not so much if you’re at your own office, where you’re probably already plugged into the network.
It also works for using a cell phone as a modem, as long as the phone has an IrDA port.
But, as mentioned above, Bluetooth does it better - it’s faster and while it is still a rather short-distance medium, it’s not a literal line-of-sight method like IrDA is - IrDA can be a bit fussy about the two devices being lined up just so in order for the invisible light signal to get across.
ETA: The “Ir” in IrDA is infrared light, the same stuff that’s used by nearly every TV remote, and the acronym stands for Infrared Data Association.
Thanks for your replies. I guess I don’t need them, unless I just want to play around.