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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?"
Read my lips.
THAT IS NOT WHAT BLUETOOTH IS FOR.
Bluetooth is for personal (that is, on your person) area networking.
It is, by design, a short-range, low-powered protocol. Your mobile phone is a radio with a range of two or three miles...why the hell do you want ANOTHER radio with a range of 30 feet (with the commensurate power consumption which maps directly onto weight) to communicate with a device that should be in your pocket anyway?
Bluetooth, when properly implemented, is great. It's not designed to be the only wireless protocol: It's narrowly designed to do one thing. Replace wires. That, it does well.
The article criticizes BT because it does exactly what it's designed to do. That's silly.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
This story sounds like a wrap-up of an SNS issue, written by analyst Mark Anderson about half a year ago. Yes, Bluetooth has essentially failed to deliver promises on its wild popularity, and Wi-Fi is the NBT (Next Big Thing). However, it's important to remember that Bluetooth and Wi-Fi were designed for different reasons.
If Bob Frankston were writing for an automotive magazine, he'd probably write a subheading 'Why has car business flourished while bikes have essentially failed? Should we even care about bikes?' If you want to connect to the Internet and have wireless access within your house or in the hotel room, use Wi-Fi. But what if all you want is to have devices talk to one another? Remote control to your car computer, telephone handset to the telephone base, PDA to the laptop, etc.? In some cases Bluetooth makes sense more than 802.11b, if you consider cost of deployment and power consumption issues.
Thus Bluetooth is not really a competitor, it's a niche technology that's out there and that's getting more attention from manufacturers. Wi-Fi is immensely bigger and more marketable, but in the nutshell Bluetooth has its own applications and will persist in hardware design for next few years.
I use Bluetooth to connect my PDA to my GSM phone. Now I have access to Internet about everywhere through GPRS. I can do it at the restaurant table while dining with friends or while walking on the street when coming back from work. I like it. This is a fine utilisation of a PAN and as long as Bluetooth is faster than GPRS, none of its limitations matter. Low power low distance is acutally an advantage because it reduces the risk of interference. No big deal for now but what if the technology become pervasive?
The reason Bluetooth doesn't take off is it is poorly marketed. It is waaay overpriced to get any widspread adoption.
There were approximately 10m PDAs sold worldwide in 2002. Of those, around 4m were sold in the United States. That's somewhere around 1.5% of the population. Even assuming that many people already had PDAs, that's maybe 3% of the population. In short -- only rich businessmen (and technophiles who always buy the latest gadgets). And that's PDAs sold. PDAs used is probably much lower -- while I only two 2 people who use PDAs, I do know around 10 people who have PDAs (most got them as presents and haven't used them since the initial tinkering around). Hell, I myself have a PDA (Dell Axim X5) I got for free, but I haven't really used it, because I just don't see what it's good for.
Where am I basing my personal observations? A computer science department at a university, of all places. One prof. and one departmental secretary has a PDA, the rest don't. And that's much higher than in the non-CS departments, where absolutely nobody has one. It's the same many other places. My dad's company gave away free PDAs to their engineers, but only around maybe 10% of them actually use their PDAs.
Cell phones have a much greater market penetration.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10