Bluetooth: The missing profile

It just occoured to me that as wonderful as bluetooth is, my cell phone cannot tell me when my nifty wireless headset is running low on batteries. Why isn't battery status reported via bluetooth? I've got a dozen bluetooth devices now, and every one of them has a power LED that blinks one color or another when it starts to run low. My new cell phone just hangs up when my headset runs out of juice.

I like the new Sony/Erickson watch. It shows Caller ID when someone calls you. And when you leave your phone at home (when the phone goes out of range), it sounds an alarm to remind you to go back and get it. What a great idea. (too bad you have to recharge the watch with that funky dock thing instead of using kinetic motion to recharge while you walk arround.)

Laptop Gaming

Laptops have been selling like hotcakes over the last few years, and more people I know are buying them over PCs. But we still want to play our games! I would certainly jump through a few hoops to be able to play games on my laptop without requiring the CD. These days, the CD is only used for launch-time checking, but that still requires that I bring a handfull of game CDs with me when I travel. The Steam engine is nice (electronic distribution), but it requires internet access to launch the game.

Hey game publishers: What about a usb dongle or something instead of these gay CD protection schemes? All of the protection schemes you've been using have been cracked (unless it resorts to hidden rootkits)....admittedly some of them require quite a few hoops to jump through. And I really would like to just *try* some games. Whatever happened to DEMOS? Neverwinter Nights 2 may be good enough to buy, but I want to see how well it will run on my laptop, and I want to see how fun it is.