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Bluetooth Gets Faster & Requires Less Power
An anonymous reader writes "The Bluetooth Special Interest Group (BSIG) has announced a new specification named "Enhanced Data Rate" or EDR for short. EDR aims to provide faster data transmission and reduce the power consumption from traditional Bluetooth technology. The data speeds will be roughly three times faster which means you could easily use multiple Bluetooth devices simultaneously. The reduced power consumption also means longer battery life and less heat generated. The new EDR standard will be backward compatible with the current standard Bluetooth devices. This makes upgrading to the new standard effortless."
With Bluetooth I'm able to also connect to the internet on trips but I'm also now sending wallpapers, ringtones etc to my phone. :P
Another favourite feature is the Address Book sync. Its such a paint to enter full Address Book entries on the phone so instead I enter on the comp. and sync it with my phone. Bluetooth ain't so bad
You can't compare the two. Bluetooth uses a much lower power consumption and is meant for very low-range transfers (1 milliwatt and 30 ft, respectively) where Wi-Fi uses 100 milliwatts and goes up to 300 feet.
They're used for different things; local/personal -area transfers vs. high-speed internet connections.
A friend of mine mentioned to me the other day that some phone companies (like sprint) are being very cautious about offering bluetooth support in their phones because bluetooth makes it so easy to share the internet connection on the phones. A lot of the phone companies (like sprint) are offering unlimited internet plans, and bluetooth phones would lead to a lot of abuse with people using the connections for their laptops instead of their cellphones. Anyway, it is one of the reasons that bluetooth adoption isn't taking off as fast as it should.