Should We Give Up On Bluetooth?

Audent asks: "I've been reading (and writing) about 'Bluetooth ^[?] Coming Soon!' for what seems like years now... Is it time to give up? Where are the products? Where are the new devices that promise piconetworks and the like? And what about the risks from having an entire network of Bluetoothed devices beaming around this already saturated office of mine (100 people plus PCs plus printers, scanners, laptops, palmtops, cellphones times Bluetooth equals...?) I know they run on the same band as microwave ovens (2.4GHz) but they won't interfere with each other but are we all going to be cooked by these tiny chips? Or will Bluetooth take off in the way USB did once the first products came out in commercial quantities?" Bluetooth sounds great on paper, but have life's realities proven too much in terms of getting working implementations out of the door?

Comments

Bluetooth available

[Snowfox]

It's a bit premature to give up on Bluetooth. As the author says, USB didn't catch on quickly either.

USB caught on because of Apple's initial adoption of the technology. People were used to paying a premium for Mac peripherals, which made targetting USB desireable.

Today, Bluetooth is just starting to appear in laptops. (I'm buying a Dell Inspiron 8000 with Bluetooth support. Bluetooth is now shipping.) Again, with laptops, people are used to paying a premium for most peripherals. And once there are enough people with Bluetooth-ready laptops out there, just waiting to spend a few bucks to use them, we can expect to see hardware manufacturers racing for the opportunity to charge the premium prices.

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My opinions are mine.

Vaporware with great potential

[Matt_Bennett]

Bluetooth has been, and is right now, largely vaporware, though it is slowly gaining ground. The first big hurdle has been cheap, integrated chipsets, and we should have good, mass produced silicon very soon, if it isn't here already (if they are here, they've come in the past 6 months). Once the installed base is here, we'll need the infrastructure to support it, unfortunately, no-one will build the infrastructure, until there is a large installed base. When the larger infrastructure is in place, the demand will rise. Right now, we have no infrastructure, and therefore no demand. This is why the Bluetooth silicon makers have pretty much only talked to the big players in the electronics industry, like Nokia, and the big computer manufacturers. I used to work for a smaller manufacturer of devices, and the Bluetooth silicon vendors didn't want to talk to us when we were talking about paltry volumes of 10-50K units/year.

This is much like what happened with cellular phones- at first a neat gadget, but not very useful due to the lack of coverage, then better coverage, but awfully expensive, and now we are at the point where the coverage is pretty extensive and the costs can rival a landline. The demand for ubiquitous networking is growing- something will fill the gap.

What, give up?!?

[Bud]

Hey, Bluetooth has been in the making for several years but it's definitely not outdated! On the contrary, it's just on time.

• The speed of Bluetooth (up to 115kbps) is enough for most uses.
  
• Power requirements are LOW (milliwatts) making the chips very embeddable.
  
• No line-of-sight required! This will create a new breed of interconnected devices -- lots of small specialized gadgets that live in your coat pocket or your bag and don't do very much on their own -- but what little they do, they do extremely well. (Compare to the Unix way, with hundreds of specialized command line utilities.)
  
• Authentication and encryption -- only you can connect to your mobile phone.
  
• Bluetooth is reputedly a sturdier protocol than WLAN, meaning that it won't suffer as much from clashes. (OK, the microwave oven is the clear winner here...)
  
• The first Bluetooth-enabled devices are appearing on the market NOW.
  

Bluetooth is going to be a winner.

--Bud