This week we've got a couple of tools that provide interesting mobility features:

GN Netcom wireless conferencing

We have weekly meetings, and we also have a distributed staff. Those of us in the office usually crowd around a speakerphone, where we hear voices of our co-workers coming out of tiny speakers.

So we were intrigued when GN Netcom sent us the GN 9120 system, which consists of a tiny base station that connects to a telephone and some GN 100 wireless (2.4GHz) headsets. The base station acts like a cordless hub for teleconferencing. A person with the GN 9120 connected to the speakerphone can initiate a conference call, and other wireless headsets can then associate their headsets to the base station. Instead of people crowding around a tiny telephone, people can sit back and talk through the wireless headset. And the base stations have a range of about 300 feet, so participants also can roam around, go back to their desks.

Setting up the system takes a few minutes (basically figuring out which cord goes where to connect the base station). While the benefit of being able to move around was cool, the sound quality of the headsets was a bit disappointing. Several times, the person on the other end of the call said they couldn't hear us, even though we were speaking at a normal volume. The boom microphone on the headset we received was too short. (The company Web site says headsets with longer microphones are available. Use those.) And while the two speakers "in house" could hear each other clearly, we had a hard time hearing the person on the other end of the conference. It's possible that some of the volume settings on the headsets were not aligned correctly, but we thought the sound quality could have been better out of the box.

So you give something away for the benefit of being able to roam or not crowd around a telephone. It costs $350. If that appeals to you, check out the Web site.

Baracoda Bluetooth "pencil"

The BaracodaPencil is a bar-code scanner the size of a Magic Marker that connects to a computer via Bluetooth. Basically, the pencil lets users scan bar codes directly into an application without having to be connected via a wire.

The BaracodaPencil uses the BlueCore chip from Cambridge Silicon Radio (CSR) for its Bluetooth abilities. The chip features low power consumption, which the company says lets the scanner conduct about 2,000 scans per charge (it comes with a recharger). The scanner can connect to a desktop/laptop application, but also can connect to a PDA or tablet PC. The design lets it double as a stylus for either a PDA or tablet.

Based on some previous Bluetooth installations, we were dreading the setup, but we found this one relatively simple (the kit came with a Bluetooth USB dongle that we connected to a laptop). While we didn't have any fancy applications to work with (Baracoda says it can help developers create specific applications for use with the scanner), the scanner works with some Windows applications, such as Excel and WordPad. We ran around the office scanning bar codes off everything we could find, and the digits of the bar code magically appeared in our application.