Holiday Shopping with a “UWB Engineer”: The Saga Continues

As the smoke clears on the 2022 holiday season, our frazzled and notoriously shopping-impaired protagonist takes a much-needed breather and surveys what months of carefully considered holiday shopping has wrought. The results? Quite frankly the results could have been better. Here’s what transpired. 

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The electronic drum set you bought for your daughter was admittedly a bold gambit from the get-go. Everything looked good on paper when you measured the potential drawbacks/disruption against the monthly cost of a rehearsal space to house her conventional, loud-as-bombs drum set that everyone agreed could no longer be played anywhere near the house or neighborhood. In a correspondingly genius move, you also bought your daughter the nicest, highest performing wireless headphones you could find to pair with the drums, and held your breath and hoped she wouldn’t notice the latency lag from e-drums to headset.

She noticed. She noticed right away, in fact, and within two minutes of indulging in some self-congratulatory reveling in the non-drumming sounds coming from your daughter’s room, she charged through the door and announced that the headphones were useless, but the e-drums were quite nice and she intended to run them through a PA system until you figured out plan B. 

Meanwhile, your youngest son is wrapping up his first year of gaming alongside his older siblings, and he faced some stiff headwinds along the way. That’s the most charitable description you can muster for the non-stop, utter shellacking he endured at the hands of his merciless and more game-savvy brothers and sisters. Even when you couldn’t see the carnage unfolding in the next room, you could hear the despair in his voice and the grizzly slaughter he was experiencing over and over again. This has to change.

The ultra-low latency wireless mouse you got him for the holiday gives him a much-needed competitive advantage – and a ray of hope. Armed with the fastest, most responsive mouse on the market, he might finally stand a chance against his sibs. And that new glimmer of confidence in his eyes makes it totally worth it.  

Over at grandma’s place, your holiday gift giving exploits didn’t go over like you’d hoped.  The audio delay on her brand spanking new video conferencing device made it difficult to talk with her when the whole family dialed in for a special holiday hello.  Primitive conferencing systems are commonplace at the office so you’re no stranger to the frustration – and occasional shenanigans – they can induce. But you don’t want to put grandma through that hassle.  She doesn’t have much time left! Or so she likes to tell you literally every time she sees you, purely for dramatic effect (grandma’s just fine and you’re pretty sure she can do more push-ups than you).

Your spouse did much better than you did in the gift giving department this year, gifting you a subscription to a lossless music streaming service. This was a really, really thoughtful gift – you’ve both lamented that it shouldn’t be so hard to enjoy music wirelessly in high quality. The CD player collecting dust in the basement delivers better sound to this day than anything our 21^st century wireless gadgetry can do, and this seems unfathomable. 

So the lossless music streaming service will be a welcome presence on your wired hi-fi speakers. But sadly it will be wasted on your wireless earphones, where lossy, compressed audio continues to haunt you like those old photos of you with a gigantic 1990s Sony Discman strapped to your hip. 

In each and every case – from your children to your grandmother in fantastic health – you know there’s much, much better wireless comms technology coming soon with high throughput, ultra-low latency, interference resistant, extreme low power UWB technology. The kind of breakthrough tech that’s able to power future AR/VR devices. And not the clunky early prototypes. The real thing. 

So rejoice this holiday season! UWB is coming soon to our consumer devices – all kinds of devices, not just positioning tags and key FOBs. For beleaguered shoppers everywhere, gift giving decisions are about to get a lot easier.