Wireless sensor technology is hot, thrilling, promising and definitely poised to bring up web innovation to the next level.
With slew of solutions, it is hard to find a product tailored for a personal hands-on project of mine ( will disclose later 
I’ve stumbled across many wireless sensors product. I’ve quickly shunt aside some of them:
- Arch Rock: no starter kit available. Their vision to bring the IP world to the sensors is pretty cool. It should open new doors for innovation and will bridge the sensed reality and the web…but for quick prototyping, it is not suitable.
- Dust Networks: too expensive for the starter kit ( don’t want to disclose but it is more than my budget ). It is not tailored for quick prototyping due to its complexity. However, it may be a great solution for robust, reliable systems.
- Sentilla: WOW, Java support, 199$ for the starter kit including two motes, one USB gateway. A mote is out-of-box equiped with a acceleration, temperature, volt, til sensors. However, it looks like their new strategy is to focus on an energy management solution for data centers. Should they drop their perk kit support, I’d rather be very careful with my chersihed motes.
- Arduino family: yes, Arduino can come with an XBee module . Arduino is definitely promised to a great future!
My decision was to go for the Sentilla perk kit. I just love the Java support which should smooth up the development phase for prototyping….I’ll be trying out the Arduino XBee module after the prototyping so as to bring down costs and schlep my demo to to the open source completely.