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Rob Enderle Announces Death of Bluetooth
prostoalex writes "Rob Enderle is typing away (perhaps even on his very own Ferrari laptop) at Intel Developer Forum, noting that Intel gave up on IEEE Ultrawideband and decided to switch to Wireless USB derivative. This, in Mr. Enderle's opinion, signifies the end of life for Bluetooth standard, although Enderle calls Bluetooth 'dead' in the title of the article and 'all but dead' in the actual text."
Its pretty clear most of us don't care much about what Rob Enderle has to say. Apple has integrated bluetooth and I love it. Its in many devices and its cheaply priced.
Plus I would never be caught dead with a Ferrari laptop.
I imagine you looked like quite the dork having to hold your Palm and phone at just the right angle to keep the infrared link going. With Bluetooth, I can do that with my phone in my pocket, or even in the next room.
Hey kids, there's only 5 days left 'til Yak Shaving Day!
From what I can tell, the biggest problem a lot of consumers seem to have with BT boils down to the image that it has - a lot of people seem to think that it's sort of a short-range 802.11b. I've seen it pop up in everything from people's comments about Bluetooth's devices to Palm's webpage on wireless technologies in its devices - it groups BT with 802.11b and WAN technologies, without really making it clear that the only real similarity that BT has with the other two is that it operates over radio frequencies. The attitude seems to be that Bluetooth is just a wimpy version of WiFi without the internet connectivity.
Personally, I'm not sure I'll agree with that attitude until CompUSA starts selling keboards and mice with MAC addresses.
Infrared is hard to use at high speeds when you're moving. That line-of-sight issue can do it in every time.
Bluetooth is meant mostly for human interface devices... the abilty to drive a printer or do other networking tasks is just a nice bonus.
Ultrawideband technology is looming on the horizon, with silicon from Intel reportedly due by the end of this year and the first consumer products due out in 2005. It's supposed to start out at 400Mb/s and ramp up from there--so by comparison, Bluetooth's bandwidth just plain stinks.
Can anyone "in the know" explain the difference between the Motorola/XtremeSpectrum and the Texas Instruments/Intel implementations of UWB? Which is supposed to be better? Which is higher bandwidth?
You can pay this guy to say anything. See his website where he even gives an example:
e nc eAcct.htm
http://www.enderlegroup.com/products/prod_refer
I am shocked to how much coverage this utterly clueless individual gets on Slashdot.
on a clie peg-ux50. I predict enderle is wrong, because of a simple observation i have made from several weeks of using this device. WIFI kills the battery nearly instantly - you can practically watch the meter drain. You would not get more than an hour or two. Bluetooth seems to draw nearly nothing. I have been surfing for several hours, and the battery is at 87%.
There is simply no comparison to being uncabled from your phone, and the $30 USB pc adapter has a 100 meter range that I have personally seen at least 50 of.
For local wireless nets with realistic power consumption, there seems to be no other game in town. I'm sure people have trouble, but it works effortlessly for me. I am guessing it will remain comfortably in its niche for some time. A welcome thing.
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it should also be noted that firewire was out for some years before usb2 arrived. that's a longgg time in the computer world, and usb2 still doesn't transfer as much power as firewire nor have as high of a consistent data transfer rate. yes usb2 is 480mb/s and firewire is 400, but usb2's 480 claim is in bursts not sustained transfer rate so firewire is still as fast. the coolest thing about usb2 though is it's backwards compatability (usb2 devices can be plugged into usb 1.1 ports).
and yes, firewire 800 devices are common but only in devices capable of that much bandwidth, which is really only portable harddrives. and last i checked, 800mbps is a tad higher than 480mb/s.
- tristan
Wireless USB was just announced yesterday. It sounds quite useful, but you won't be able to buy a wireless USB gadget until (at least) Christmas 2005. It'll add at least $20 to the price of a device (compared to $5 for Bluetooth and 50 cents for regular USB), so it won't be used much until the price comes down.
Yeah- don't tell Intel either.
/. story is nothing but a troll designed to whip you geeks into an anti-Intel frenzy? Imagine that...
Wait? You mean Intel is adding bluetooth support to next gen Centrino, and this whole
The death of Bluetooth view is being advocated from a perspective that says Intel is in the driver's seat - a very PC centric view. Take a look from another perspective - device centred - and the picture looks much much different.
Cheap devices use ASICs and ASSPs to implement Bluetooth. IBM, NEC, Toshiba, LSI, and somewhere down the line Mitsubish are the major ASIC and ASSP players. Now, with that in mind re-read my post, especially this part:
IBM and NEC both just dropped support for Bluetooth in their ASIC core selection (which is key to cellphone, other cheap device, and mobo mfg'ers), LSI and Mitsubishi stopped development altogether after wasting some cash trying to figure out what the spec actually was and how to plug the holes in it safely.
Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but you bought a phone with an ASIC inside that includes a core that is no longer supported. That means there will be nore updated models of your device, no big deal, but it also means no new Bluetooth support in that line either. Which is what we're discussing. As much as I hate to agree with that ferarri-licking laptop monkey, he's right.
everything in moderation
I remember reading that Microsoft did not want to support it because it was too open as a standard.
Actually, Microsoft Hardware has already introduced the first products in a line of Bluetooth accessories to replace their old wireless keyboards and mice...
Soory, Id prefer a USB 2.0 based solution as much as the next guy but Bluetooth definetly isnt hard to use. Yesterday I connected a Nokia 6310 with a Sony Vaio Notebook via Bluetooth and I had NEVER done this before. I might not be totally PC illerate but it was a matter of turning on bluetooth on both devices and authorizing both devices. Then I was able to surf the web using the cellphone as a modem. It was easy to explain to my customer how to do this. He was only half listening but got it in two minutes. If it could get any easier I would like to know how?
Lispy
"IMHO, the spec never settled and was originated by under-qualified individuals."
That, I can fully believe, after having worked with several BT protocol stacks. Who the hell designs a protocol, where part of it is baked into the hardware? That's just begging for incompatibility, with absolutely no way to fix it.
It's not too hard to recognize a BT-enabled device, but it's damn hard to get things talking to each other, UNLESS you're using the "right" combination of BT dongles and phones. Interoperability is a real issue, and due to the hardware component of the protocol, it ain't ever going to go away.
And I still don't see BT in anything other than phones and PCs. No BT in your fridge. No BT in your toaster. No BT in your stereo. Maybe BT in your upscale car (but that's only to talk to your phone). Maybe BT in your wireless keyboard and mouse, BUT wireless keyboards and mice have been around for quite a while, BT or not. There's a BT game controller BUT they had to rework the protocol to reduce the latency so that it would actually be useful.
Looks like BT has carved out a telephony niche and not much else. But that's not what BT was supposed to be. It was supposed to be this super-cheap feature, that you could add to anything for an extra $3 on the BOM. According to the BT zealots, by now, BT was supposed to be in EVERYTHING, even in your dog. And still the only things I see it put it, are phones.
1. Intel chipsets had USB builtin since the days of USB 1.0, thus for about half of the sold motherboards (those with Intel chipset), USB was just there without additional cost. Firewire required extra hardware until non-Intel chipset designers started to put it into their products.
2. Firewire uses an own controller design to handle the protocol, making the chip design to support Firewire more complex. USB does a lot of work in the software USB driver, thus making for a more simple chip design or an easier integration of USB into the I/O part of the chipset (mostly in the southbridge).
This basicly covers also the pros and contras for USB and Firewire.
USB is cheaply to implement in hardware, and you can add functionality later in the driver. So USB-support for non-commodity platforms is more complex, because you have to write more complex drivers. USB transfer rate is coupled with system load, a loaded system can't keep the full transfer rate, and USB transfers in reverse generate considerable system load at higher rates.
Firewire is more complex to do in hardware, but once it is implemented, the drivers are quite straight forward and generic and thus easily implementable on different platforms. Protocol extensions will break backward compatibility though or require at least a software compatibility layer to run also on older hardware. But firewire transfers are not coupled with the system throughput and can run with high rates on highly loaded systems or slow CPUs.
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Firewire is superior for hardrives and similar applications but it negates the advantage of having only one type of bus for everything so if tomorrow we all had to choose one and only one I'd go with USB but as it stands now both have their uses
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
Let's remember that Firewire is just a better form of SCSI-III. Smaller cable, and no more fiddling with device ids and termination. As it is SCSI based the speed and device chaining starts to make more sense huh?
The other benefit of Firewire is that it doesn't require a root node. You can, in theory, plug a Firewire camera into a Firewire VCR with no computer involved. USB is centered around a computer containing a root node.
Allow me to chime in, Enderle is a tool. I'm suprised that anyone pays this guy to write anything. What a complete moron. I'm less and less suprised that articles written by this fool are being posted on slashdot.
The quality of posts is somewhat lessened of late...
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Back in college as an exercise I wrote a mini-white paper on the Bluetooth technology spec.
It's pretty interesting stuff.
I completely understand why it's dead now though. Lackluster following of the specs (even by people who helped write it), a very complicated model of master-slave interaction, and several different layers of protocols to contend with made Bluetooth a good idea in theory....but not so much in practice.
It was kinda cool while it lasted, though.