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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?"
Oh, wait, PHB's read this stuff but not slashdot, nevermind.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
King Harald 'Bluetooth' (Danish Harald Blåtand) was the King of Denmark and died in 986AD.
/. this is *really* old news!
Come on
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!
Bluetooth is widely used outside the US. And it works well for applications beyond headsets, like synchronizing PDAs and desktops, mobile web access from your PDA, and wireless printing. Bluetooth is far more secure for things like wireless keyboards and will probably take over in that area.
Bluetooth is easier to configure and administer than 802.11a/b/g--people can just do it themselves. And Bluetooth has much better battery life and smaller antennas.
I don't understand the reluctance of US cell phone carriers to offer Bluetooth-capable phones--they are not significantly more expensive than equivalent non-Bluetooth phones. I sometimes think that they don't offer it because they want to control how you access the Internet through their networks. With Bluetooth, you can easily and comfortably use your laptop or PDA, and your own software, to access the Internet through your cell phone. IR and wired, OTOH, iareso cumbersome that most people don't bother, if they are even available.
Look for Bluetooth for your next cell phone and PDA. Consider getting a Bluetooth access point for better battery life from your PDA and laptop. Bluetooth isn't expensive and it's pretty nice.
Note that there are long-range versions of Bluetooth (300ft) and that there are high-speed versions in development.
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'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 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.
No. It's dead. 802.11x is a far better solutioin for most everything. 802.11x offers better speed, range and availabillity.
As already mentioned, Bluetooth is not intended to be a networking technology. It is one up from I-R and one down from Wi-Fi. Its one up to I-R because it allows simple devices, close together, to communicate together, simply, and not need to be in line of sight. It is one down from Wi-Fi because there is no need to use something this heavy duty to transfer simple data, doing so would simply be cost restrictive and over kill - this would be akin to using 4 ton truck for moving a box's worth of paper in your office.
People who understand Bluetooth are using it for things like wireless keyboards, mice and synching PDAs and mobile phone to PCs. Printers are a special case, since in most cases you would want to use Wi-Fi, but by using Bluetooth you allow a simple PDA to print out a document - I suppose printers are pushing Bluetooth to the limits of what it was designed for.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
Yeah and with 802.11 you find chalk outside your door and someone has taken over control of your electric nosehair groomer.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
What's wrong with wires? They tangle. They wad up in my pocket and make it harder to rig my earphone. I have to have a different one to perform each task (attach phone to PDA, attach PDA to GPS, attach GPS to computer, make up all your own permutations). They are expensive and fragile.
Do they have to be expensive? Of course they don't. It's a wire, with a plastic doohickey on each end. How many mobile electronics vendors are making universal cable systems? With the conspicuous exception of audio headphones, zero.
I hate wires. It's a problem I percieve, and a solution I'm willing to pay for. Therefore, from my perspective, it is good technology.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
I agree that Bluetooth needs to hit a certain density in common consumer goods before it will be really useful, but some of your examples are pretty unlikely to be part of that process.
Point-by-point:
- A Bluetooth headset would make a terrible home-phone add-on; I expect my cordless phone at home to at least function throughout the main floor of my house, if not into the yard, basement, etc. With a Bluetooth headset, I wouldn't be able to move more than a few paces from the wired phone line.
- Remote control applications could be good, but again, depending on environmental radio noise, etc., I'd probably prefer for my TV to stick with IR. Of course, I don't really watch TV, so I can't speak to how convenient it is to not have to keep track of a seperate remote.
- As for the Bluetooth remote for two boxes, that's (AFAIK) a hypothetical future product which could be accomplished just as easily with a properly implemented IR system. Again, the radio noise and lack of range would also make me think twice about replacing infrared.
- The keyboard and mouse are definitely a useful thing, whether they're connecting to a phone, PDA, or even a desktop PC.
- See above
- Again, device synchronization is one of the most logical (and already well-supported) uses for Bluetooth. If you (or a friend or coworker) have access to a recent-model Mac, you should check out iSync with the built-in Bluetooth adapters. My roommate has a Sony/Ericsson Bluetooth-enabled phone, a Palm Tungsten T, and a new 12" PowerBook, all of which link up and sync nicely via iSync. (Now, if only T-Mobile would get a clue on their GPRS pricing, we could all start chucking out our old 56k modems.)
As for the size and cost of Bluetooth, well...it's really not significantly cheaper or smaller than 802.11b. They both work on similar frequencies, with similar degrees of signal processing complexity. The main differences come from 802.11b being at least an order of magnitude more powerful a signal, and requiring more processing power to take advantage of the bandwidth it offers (which is about *two* orders of magnitude greater).
For extremely low-bandwidth connection of I/O devices and short-range transfer of compact binary data, Bluetooth has some real potential. Much of it's vaunted simplicity and cost savings, though, are simply industry hype, generated largely by the same companies that are trying to sell Bluetooth chipsets and design services to electronics manufacturers, and those manufactorers who are trying to push consumers to upgrade to the new top-of-the-line models that support it.
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