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:
“The popularity of that baby-faced boy, who possessed not even the elements of a good actor, was a hallucination in the public mind, and a disgrace to our theatrical history.”
—Thomas Campbell (1777–1844)
“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)
“A more problematic example is the parallel between the increasingly abstract and insubstantial picture of the physical universe which modern physics has given us and the popularity of abstract and non-representational forms of art and poetry. In each case the representation of reality is increasingly removed from the picture which is immediately presented to us by our senses.”
—Harvey Brooks (b. 1915)