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The Death of Bluetooth?
Aaron Cherrington writes "Bob Frankston
has written an article
in which he declares that Bluetooth has
failed. The article states that despite the fact it is wireless, it still
has all of the limitations of wires. Is it too early to declare the death of
Bluetooth, or can we can expect more out of it?"
I had a bluetooth headset for the bluetooth sony/ericson phone, and it sucked. i couldnt get more than 15 feet from the phone. It claims 10 meters, but didnt come close. cant imagine much else comming out with it. just get a pda phone with 3g.
One big benefit of Bluetooth, as one of the user comments on the article's site stated, is it's low-power consumption. So for devices that don't require long distance connections (i.e. keyboard, mouse, cell phone, etc.), Bluetooth is a very convenient technology - WiFi is kinda overkill.
I have never even used a blue tooth enbable device. It all seemed a little flakey to me. Also I've had several friends on mac and windows say they simply couldn't get their device to work and if it did work it would crap out on them all the time.
Hold up, wait a minute, let me put some pimpin in it
it still has all of the limitations of wires.
Except for the *wires* part!
I have a bluetooth headset that I use with my cellphone and it's much more convenient than corded headsets which almost always get tangled and broken.
I have about 4 headsets here with the wires torn out of the earpiece which usually results from the wires getting caught on something while I'm running.
Bluetooth has its place. It's designed for PANs(personal area networks) where WiFi would be way overkill.
The current wave of cell phones supporting bluetooth should pull the standard through. I was recently able to deploy 3 new phones with identical corporate (large) phone books without pulling numbers in by hand OR buying yet another cell adapter OR schleeping down to the verizon store. It was Useful Technology. (tm) I think I may pick up a bluetooth keyboard and mouse as test items.
I've got a T68i. It syncs with Entourage on both my Power Mac and my iBook. It acts as a modem for my iBook when I need it. It interacts beautifully with the Address Book app on both Macs, letting me make and take calls and send and receive SMS. It works great with my Plantronics M1000 headset, letting me make and take calls in the car without having to take my eyes off the road, fumble around for the handset, or worry about catching wires on anything. And it does all of these things while still sitting in my pocket.
Bluetooth may not be perfect in its current incarnation, but it's a damn sight better than keying in all my contacts with a numeric keypad, or having to buy a stupid proprietary cable to connect the phone to anything.
~Philly
I responded (as have many slashdotters above) that surely the two weren't for the same task, and thus were surely destined to exist in parallel, in adjacent market sectors. He told me this wouldn't be true, and his explanation went something like this:
Bluetooth has two main selling points:
But, he predicted, both of these would be eroded quickly. The former would vanish, he said, when both bluetooth and 802.11 are cost-reduced down to single-chip solutions (which now they mostly are). Sure, the 802.11 chip is bigger than its bluetooth buddy, but the cost-differential is pretty slight.
The latter would still apply, but he predicted (and it's come true, although not yet productised) that the 802.11 folks would produce a low-power, short-range version.
So one of Bluetooth's advantages (for its own market) is largely obviated, the latter partially so. Set this against the economies of scale that 802.11 enjoys, and the greatly enhanced oppertunities for interoperation that the dominant standard enjoys, and the "roaming" use of Bluetooth is beaten, resoundingly.
Bluetooth had two other markets in mind:
- as a desktop "wire replacement", for keyboards, mice, etc., essentially replacing the many proprietary protocols in that space, and for stuff for which we now use USB. Bluetooth can't beat USB on cost or performance, which leaves only the mouse and keyboard market. Sure, it would be nice if your digital camera or mp3 player would just "see" the PC without your having to hook up some cables, but the cable burden isn't that onerous. Now, 802.11 may be cheap, but I think it'll be a few years yet before I have an 802.11 mouse. So there is a market there for bluetooth, but it's small, and bluetooth isn't compelling enough to displace the proprietary guys there.
- the true "personal area network", where all the devices I wear interact with one another, and dock to my pc when I sit at my desk. Well, all those devices (PDAs, cameras, cellphones, mp3) have (or are now) converging on a single device (which we call a phone, 'though it is many things besides). This leaves bluetooth with another thin market segment - connecting cellphones to PCs. Again, cheap fast cables, IRDA, and proprietary RF solutions all own this space, and again bluetooth isn't compelling enough to displace them.
Every product has to answer the same challenge - not "are you useful" but "are you useful ENOUGH".## W.Finlay McWalter ## http://www.mcwalter.org ##
Your batteries will die in 20 minutes trying to power a 2-foot link.
Funny... I get 3 hours out of my Zaurus and it's 802.11b card.
1.5 if I use the backlight.
either you have absolutely no clue as to what you are talking about, or you have a really REALLY crappy pda.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
That's precisely the point; the transmitter is lower power, so the batteries last longer.
Also, bluetooth is much slower, maxing out at around 700kb/s.
Yes, but WiFi transmits faster, so doesn't transmit as long. Ten times the power and speed for 1/10 of the time is the same power.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"Radio waves are much longer than UV, IIRC the spectrum is something like Gamma rays (will penetrate skin, wood, steel... pretty much whatever you throw at it with the exception of some dense elements like lead, and cause all sorts of problems) X-rays (penetrate skin, can cause cancer, not as bad as gamma), UV (penetrates skin, but not far. causes skin cancer, the rest of your body is okay), Visible light (no penetration. no cancer). microwaves (excites water molecules, not much else) and then, we go off to radio waves. radiowaves don't have nearly enough energy to do anything at all to you, particularly slice apart DNA (which is where the cancer problems come from)
These aren't gamma ray devices we're talking about, not even UV devices... they're long wave devices, which are harmless