Bluetooth 4.0 - What does it mean?
Wednesday, December 23rd, 2009Ok,
So did you hear the news about Bluetooth 4.0? Now, you many be wondering, “Why are they announcing all these new features in Bluetooth 4.0, when there’s hardly any 3.0 devices available?”. True, I agree with you there — I wish that there would be more Bluetooth 3.0 devices available so that my camera can download pictures to my PC, which I think will be one of the major use cases for Bluetooth 3.0. Now, before I explain Bluetooth 4.0, I want you all to do a little experiment for me. Do all remember the versions of 802.11? Let’s take a look at them in chronological order:
- 802.11 - 1 Mb/s
- 802.11b - 11 Mb/s
- 802.11a - ~22 Mb/s
- 802.11g - 54 Mb/s
- 802.11n - ~100 Mb/s
Conceptually, from a generic-stupid-consumer’s-point-of-view, it’s easy to see that newer versions are FASTER than the older versions, even if the naming scheme seems out of place (in other words, 802.11a came after 802.11b). That’s easy stuff, right?
Well, Bluetooth 4.0 in my opinion will confuse the average-everyday-consumer because the new spec has nothing to do with increased data rates — it’s actually all about power consumption — which equates to lower data rates. So, Bluetooth 4.0 devices will run on a coin-cell battery for YEARS (which is cool), but it will communicate at a maximum of data rate of 1 Mb/s, which may be a problem to average consumers. Additionally, Bluetooth 3.0, 2.1, 2.0, 1.1 and 1.0 are all compatible technologies, so this means that a Bluetooth 1.0 device can communicate with a Bluetooth 3.0 device. Nice huh? Well Bluetooth 4.0 won’t be able to communicate with older Bluetooth devices (which is terrible), unless one of them includes the architectures for Bluetooth 4.0 and Bluetooth 3.0 (which increases the price).
So, the technology is great, but they’re going to have a hard time explaining 4.0 to the consumer.
