Nokia's Wibree Takes on Bluetooth

narramissic writes "Nokia has developed a new, short-range wireless technology, called Wibree, that it says is a lot more power efficient than Bluetooth, which means it could be used in smaller and less costly devices. It can also use the same radio and antenna components as Bluetooth, helping keep costs down further. Wibree could compete with Bluetooth in the workplace as a way to link keyboards and other peripherals to computers. But it could also have more interesting applications for consumers, in devices such as wrist watches, toys and sports equipment." What does this say about Bluetooth, considering Nokia is a member of the Bluetooth Promoters group?

Comments

It's probably too late

[Colin Smith]

The network effect is cementing bluetooth in place. I can buy bluetooth keyboards, mice, earpieces already. OTOH, like Sony's memory stick, this may just be a way of locking dumb Nokia customers into a proprietary solution.

Re:It's probably too late

[ne0nimda]

But it could also have more interesting applications for consumers, in devices such as wrist watches, toys and sports equipment.

SWEET! I can sync my wrist watch with my computer now? I've always thought that networking a watch to connect w/ my computer and transferring the time over was soooo much more efficient than using those little dials.

Now imagine the new hacking vulnerabilities! Millions of corporate workers late; all of whome blame hackers for altering their alarm clocks!

Re:It's probably too late

[TheRaven64]

You laugh, but I would find it useful for my watch alarm to be sync'd with events in my calendar. My mobile 'phone does this already, but I am more likely to have my watch with me than my mobile.

Stupid name kills technology

[BadAnalogyGuy]

Sounds like they are trying to succeed in a non-existant market. The actual applications of Bluetooth are few and far between. The 'wireless' office never amounted to much and you know you look like an idiot with that earpiece and talking to yourself at Starbucks.

So what is a company to do? How about rebrand the technology with a worse name than it originally had? That's the ticket!

Re:Stupid name kills technology

[aadvancedGIR]

Funny enough, one of the few clever (and relatively sucessful) application of bluetooth was an universal handfree kit for cars. BTW, we are talking about a phone manufacturer that tells us that soon, the devices they sell will do almost anything except voice calls, so I'm not that surprised.

Re:Stupid name kills technology

[richdun]

[Mister Ed voice] Whoa Wiibre! [/Mister Ed voice]

Re:Stupid name kills technology

[bazorg]

you know you look like an idiot with that earpiece and talking to yourself at Starbucks.The first time I visited a cold snowy place, a lot of people seemed comfortable about walking around with their hands in their pockets and using bluetooth headsets.

What does this say about Bluetooth?

[Reality Master 201]

Uh, that Nokia would rather sell a technloogy that's all their own than promote one they don't completely control?

Re:What does this say about Bluetooth?

[jspayne]

Uh, that Nokia would rather sell a technloogy that's all their own than promote one they don't completely control?

...especially one that was originally developed by rival Ericsson, who is the #1 seller of Bluetooth chipsets?

Re:What does this say about Bluetooth?

[lawpoop]

I got modded down as 'troll' and 'offtopic' for stating this ealier, but aside from the corporate competition, there is also the social/ethnic competition between Swedes and Finns. Actually, I think it is felt more by the Finns that they are in the shadow of Sweden. Sweden ruled Finland for a long time, and Sweden is wealthier than Finland, and Finns sort of have this complex about not being wholly Scandinavian.

I am not just making this up. If you read the Finnish epic, which is said to characterize the finnish temperament, the hero Vainamoinen is actually an anti-hero. He is born old, never in his prime. One of the first stories about him is when he approaches a young bathing maiden and she runs away screaming. In the climax of the story, he rallies the troops to win back a magical device from a tribe of harpies, only to lose it in the sea during the epic battle. He's just not a winner.

The parent I posed my original topic had said that 'a better tech had come along'. What a socially naive geek perspective. Sure, new things just drop out of the sky like clockwork. People are never motivated by petty social identies, like Ohio State vs. Michigan, US vs. Canada, MS vs. Apple, Ericsson vs. Nokia, or Finland vs. Swedend.

So my votes goes for a Nokia vs. Ericsson, Finland vs. Sweden thing.

Too many technologies

[ocdude]

While it's always cool to hear about new tech coming out, it makes me crazy when I hear about a new tech that is going to replace an "older" tech when the "older" tech hasn't even been around for too long. So, right now, I don't even own any bluetooth things. If this new Wibree thing starts to proliferate as much as bluetooth, does that mean that now I will have to monitor everything I buy to make sure that it works with my particular hardware? IE will I have to make sure my new laptop has both bluetooth (for "legacy devices) and wibree for whatever nokia throws at us?

The same can be said about just about any new tech that is to replace and not be compatible with old tech. USB, IMHO, did it right. USB2.0 is backwards compatible with USB1.1

Nintendo?

[pipatron]

Nintendo Wiibree anyone?

Bluetooth 2.0?

[erroneus]

Perhaps in the same way USB 2.0 emerged, Bluetooth 2.0 is due? Faster, lower power requirements, backward compatibility. Seems like the natural and sensible thing to do.

Re:Bluetooth 2.0?

[Andy Dodd]

Been around for a while.

Higher data rates, higher sound quality for headsets, error correction for headset audio (read: significantly increased range and quality).

They still haven't fixed the compatibility nightmares of Bluetooth. God forbid you might want to use a Motorola headset with a Treo for example! It'll work, but barely, and most functionality (such as picking up a call from the headset) won't work.

The state of Bluetooth stacks for Windows is even worse. Microsoft's stack doesn't seem to support anything other than the serial profile - no headset audio, no AD2P. Only 50% of the stacks available a few months ago supported headset audio, even fewer supported AD2P (high quality stereo audio). Every single Bluetooth stack insists on making the headset the default audio device for the entire system, which is useless (and incredibly annoying) when you only want to use it for a SIP/IAX softphone, Skype, Teamspeak, Ventrilo, or similar stuff. Last but not least, even though most Bluetooth stacks support the majority of hardware chipsets out there, every single one is locked to a specific device vendor. i.e. if you buy a Dell with a CSR chipset, it'll come with the Toshiba bluetooth stack (worthless since it puts all serial devices at COM40 or above which most apps don't support). The WIDCOMM stack works with CSR chipsets, but is locked to whatever vendor's CSR-based dongle you got the stack with. You can't even upgrade to a recent version in most cases. (Buy a dongle with a WIDCOMM 3.x stack, and you can't upgrade to 5.x legally).

From what I've heard, both Microsoft and Logitech BT keyboards/mice don't work well unless you use the dongle and BT stack that came with the hardware - what's the point of being Bluetooth in that case?

About the only Bluetooth device I've ever used that worked well is my GPS receiver. I've tried 3 different headsets with my Treo and 2-3 different BT stacks on my PC for use with those headsets and have never been satisfied with the results.

Doesn't say much

[AlastairMurray]

From the summary:

"What does this say about Bluetooth, considering Nokia is a member of the Bluetooth Promoters group?"

It says that Bluetooth is years old and now some that is (possibly) better has come along, nothing more.

Security this time?

[RedDirt]

One can only hope they've invested more time in securing the communications channel than in Bluetooth. Bluesnarfing for the win! Or something. =/

Wibree vs ZigBee?

[uss_valiant]

From TFA:

Wibree isn't the only contender for use in wireless sensors, however. Zigbee is an ongoing standardization project and has similar characteristics to Wibree.

I know BT and ZigBee (about ZigBee), but never heard about Wibree. I'm pretty disappointed that Nokia wants to go with this proprietary approach.
Anyway, there's a lot going on in IEEE 802.15 (Personal Area Network).

I've got Bluetooth on my phone, and never use it.

[PHAEDRU5]

I have a Nokia phone, and it has Bluetooth.

When I bought the phone, I also bought a Bluetooth headset. I gave up on the Bluetooth pretty quickly: The headset would only run for about five hours before needing to be recharged, and the phone's standby time was cut down massively.

This isn't a complaint about Bluetooth as such. It's more that current devices, as delivered, don't provide long-enough standby time, never mind talk time, when Bluetooth is enabled.

Bluetooth works fine on a Mac...

[SuperKendall]

Hate to bring up the "it just works" thing but Bluetooth works fine on a Mac, with headsets or keyboards or whatever. All new macs come with Bluetooth 2.0 integrated already, and have since the Intel switch (plus a bit before that).

The problem with Bluetooth..

[pablo_max]

The main problems with Bluetooth in my mind are complexity and cost. Qualifying a Bluetooth chip is a major pain in the butt. You need to qualify the radio part, the stack and profiles separately depending on what kind of product you have. And speaking of profiles, there are something like 30 Bluetooth profiles. Most of which overlap! So often time when you are implementing one profile you also cover all the mandatory features of another so you have to claim that one as well since you are seen as using that profiles IP! It's crazy.
Then there is the cost. 10k to list your product. If you want to add something to it after you listed it...10k please. Not to mention the testing. 30k please.
Bluetooth was going to be less then 2 bucks per radio. It's still almost double that. The Bluetooth SIG is way out of control.
IMO Nokia is smart to jump ship. However, they cant go it alone. If they were able to get Motorola on board and perhaps Samsung, I can see no reason why a lower cost alternative would not work. Assuming that data rates are there.

Bluetooth 2?

[Midnight Thunder]

Maybe they would have more luck trying to integrate this into the Bluetooth standard and proposing this as Bluetooth 2, ensuring that it stays compatible. While I understand Nokia trying to provide a new and improved technology, it needs to be done in a way not to confuse the already semi-confused buying public. By making it work with Bluetooth, in the same way as USB 1 and USB 2 or the B, G and A versions of the 802.11 standard.

my $0.02 of opinion

[Goeland86]

Having seen a few presentations about network standards, and especially wireless network standards, I think that Nokia is just trying to enhance the existing technology. Granted, there may not be a strong commercial gain to it, but the fact remains that bluetooth has been a more or less static protocol since its inception. Wifi on the other hand went through several revisions: 802.11a, b/g, now the upcoming n... There's a lot of development put into wifi. I attended a conference from Intel researchers saying they were working on enhancing the 802.11 protocol to work in a de-centralized manner, so I'm looking at this, and I'm thinking: well Wibre might just push Bluetooth further than it is. Using the same hardware base is also good, because it'll bring down manufacturing costs. I'm willing to bet we'll see the Bluetooth consortium jump on the bandwagon and help nokia widespread Wibre under a label like "Bluetooth 2.0" or something similar. Hardware and software updates all the time, why wouldn't protocols?

Wibreee vs UWB?

[braindead_in]

With Wireless USB http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_USB based on MB-OFDM on the way and backed by big names like Intel, I dont think it stands a chance. The days of proprietary technologies are over. Nobody wants to pay licensing fees anymore.

It says..

[NekoXP]

That Bluetooth isn't cheap or power efficient enough for certain devices.

That's about all :)

Not that Bluetooth isn't good and that Nokia don't like promoting it or using it, but Bluetooth is not a panacea - just a standard.

Re:It says..

[mspohr]

There is already a standard to take care of these issues (IEEE_802.15 and ZigBee) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.15

We don't need another proprietary standard... it looks like Nokia is just trying to have some standard that they can own so we'll buy more of their stuff... time to run away from this.