Popularity
IrDA was popular on PDA's, laptops and some desktops during the late 90s through the early 2000s. However, it has been displaced by other wireless technologies such as WiFi and Bluetooth, favored because they don't need a direct line of sight, and can therefore support hardware such as mice and keyboards. It is still used in some environments where interference makes radio-based wireless technologies unusable. IrDA popularity is making a comeback with its highly efficient IrSimple protocols by providing sub 1 second transfers of pictures between cell phones, printers, and display devices. IrDA hardware is still less expensive and doesn't share the same security problems encountered with wireless technologies such as Bluetooth. In addition, some Pentax DSLRs (K-x, K-r) use IRsimple for image transfer and gaming.
Read more about this topic: Infrared Data Association
Famous quotes containing the word popularity:
“Here also was made the novelty ‘Chestnut Bell’ which enjoyed unusual popularity during the gay nineties when every dandy jauntily wore one of the tiny bells on the lapel of his coat, and rang it whenever a story-teller offered a ‘chestnut.’”
—Administration for the State of Con, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)
“In everything from athletic ability to popularity to looks, brains, and clothes, children rank themselves against others. At this age [7 and 8], children can tell you with amazing accuracy who has the coolest clothes, who tells the biggest lies, who is the best reader, who runs the fastest, and who is the most popular boy in the third grade.”
—Stanley I. Greenspan (20th century)
“The nation looked upon him as a deserter, and he shrunk into insignificancy and an earldom.... He was fixed in the house of lords, that hospital of incurables, and his retreat to popularity was cut off; for the confidence of the public, when once great and once lost, is never to be regained.”
—Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield (1694–1773)