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Bluetooth Plans to Triple Bandwidth
stallard writes "Yahoo! news reports that "The Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG) Monday is releasing a three-year road map for Bluetooth short-range wireless technology that includes a tripling of bandwidth and the ability to multicast signals to seven other users.""
Whoopedy freakin' dooo...
I don't need more bandwidth from my phone to my PDA/laptop, I need more bandwidth from my phone to the tower. When GPRS picks up the snail's pace a bit then maybe we can focus on speeding up Bluetooth.
Or am I the only one who only uses BT for phone-> device communication?
Let's get one thing perfectly clear, I did not vote for George W Bush, and I do not endorse what he does or says.
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Does that mean trippling of the range??? I'd sure appreciate a fetaure like that... Here're some bluejacking links. Also, great general bluetooth info on the WebLogsInc.
Has anybody here tried to develop software to run bluetooth hardware? It's enough to make you cry! Has the SIG done anything to try and make developing applications easier?
If the 7-peer multicast limit comes from connecting to other Bluetooth phones as the slaves in a BT piconet, can they each connect to 7 other devices in their own piconets? A P2P (Piconet to Piconet) daisy chain? And will those P2P internets exclude the "peripheral" devices, like headphones and storage, that currently fill the piconets?
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make install -not war
Imagine a phone being broken into three pieces - a headset (similar to the Bluetooth ones you are seeing now), the actual phone receiver (for interacting with your provider) that is nothing more than a small matchbook sized piece without any UI, and then a full PDA to contain addresses and phone numbers. Want to call someone? Grab your PDA and hit a phone number. it uses the PAN to tell the phone what to dial, which then uses the PAN to interact with the headset.
Why imagine? This is exactly what I do every day. I have a Nokia 6310i, an Palm Tungsten T3 and a bluetooth headset. Furthermore my Thinkpad T30 also has bluetooth built in. Bluetooth is a mandatory feature for me now. Once you start using it, you'll wonder how you did without. It makes it vastly easier for electronic devices to communicate.
My phone is essentially a portable wireless base station in addition to being a phone. I can check email from either my PDA or laptop and connect through the phone without ever taking it out of my pocket or bag. If I need to sync my pda, no cables are necessary. I can touch dial numbers on my phone directly from my PDA address book. I just tap the number and it dials. I've surfed the web (albiet slowly) from my laptop while riding in a car on the highway and my phone was in the truck. Effectively my PDA and cell phone are a single device but I only have to carry the bits I'm actually going to use.
I see people compare bluetooth to 802.11X all the time but those folks miss the point. It's not about connecting to the internet. It's a replacement for almost any data-carrying wire. Bluetooth replaces my PDA sync cable, phone sync cable, mouse and keyboard USB cables, phone ear bud cable, and if needed my ethernet cable. Furthermore it could replace printer cables, IR ports, serial cables and several others. Most importantly I can take it anywhere.
WiFi is almost non-portable only replaces the ethernet cable because that is all it is designed to do. (and it does a good job of it, I'm not bashing WiFi) Bluetooth isn't optimized for what WiFi does so it's slower but also consumes less power and has other uses WiFi does not. If you are comparing WiFi to Bluetooth, you don't understand Bluetooth. Not everyone needs one or the other, but the comparison between them is silly. It's very much like comparing Firewire cables to Ethernet cables and arguing that one is better than the other. The argument just doesn't make sense.