Enhancement: Infrared

[PhillipEarl]

Being the proud owner of a Tungsten E, I can sympathize with everyone out there who can't play multiplayer due to the lack of functionality in their pda's... but infared? Come on... do you really want to sit head-to-head for twenty to thirty minutes at a time, the whole while worrying more about keeping your pda's perfectly aligned than playing the game? Break the pdas' line of communication, and the "beaming" function shuts off. Bye-bye, game! We're not talking about your tv remote, here; those infared ports are LIMITED. Sure you can communicate with another pda via infared from as much as eight feet away, if you're lucky, but that's only successful with short, burst transmissions. Bluetooth and Wifi work because they use "duplex" (or duplex-like - I'm not sure about bluetooth) signals, where data can be simultaneously sent and received. Maintaining an open, duplex line of communication requires more than infared (which, by the way, would be what's called a "simplex," or one-way, channel) can dish up! Even if both devices maintained a continuous ping, where they continually alternated between sending and receiving short bursts of data from the other, they would have to be held rock-still in order to prevent data corruption. Try doing that in the middle of a heated game while tapping all over the screen and trying to do group selections with your stylus and you'll quickly find yourself plagued by lost signal errors that effectively end your game and force you to start the level over.

Yes, it's possible to develop a version of WI that can use an infared port, but my bet would be that it wouldn't be worth the frustration of actually playing via an infared port.