bluetooth

Bluetooth is designed to enable users to connect a wide range of computing and telecommunications devices easily and simply, without the need to buy, carry, or connect cables. It delivers opportunities for rapid ad hoc connections, and the possibility of automatic, unconscious, connections between devices. It will virtually eliminate the need to purchase additional or proprietary cabling to connect individual devices. Because Bluetooth wireless technology can be used for a variety of purposes, it will also potentially replace multiple cable connections via a single radio link. It creates the possibility of using mobile data in a different way, for different applications such as "Surfing on the sofa", "The instant postcard", "Three in one phone" and many others. It will allow them to think about what they are working on, rather than how to make their technology work.

What is it - a technology, a standard, an initiative, or a product?

Bluetooth wireless technology is a de facto standard, as well as a specification for small-form factor, low-cost, short range radio links between mobile PCs, mobile phones and other portable devices. The Bluetooth Special Interest Group is an industry group consisting of leaders in the telecommunications, computing, and networking industries that are driving development of the technology and bringing it to market.

Bluetooth is mostly viewed as a perhipheral interconnect, sort of like usb or a control bus like i2c (what your remote uses to talk to your television). Compare to ieee 802.11 which is the media/transport layer of a network.

Bluetooth devices and 802.11 both operate in the unliscensed 2.4ghz ism band but bluetooth deivces operate at lower-power, typically around 2.5Milliwatts and have a range of something like 30-40' compared to the range of a standard 802.11 100 milliwatt access-point which might exceed 100 meters in circumfrance or 2.5 kilometers with highly directional antentas... Bluetooth is also a frequency hopping rather than direct sequence spread spectrum technology.

I think one of the issues that bothers the bluetooth people is that heavy use of 802.11 (ie if it's successful) may make deployment and acceptance of bluetooth harder becuase of interference from hundreds of more powerful and less spectrum efficient direct sequence devices hogging all of the available spectrum...

Basically bluetooth is useful for what it is (a 1Mbit perhipheral bus) so yeah it can replace my serial cable for syncing my palm unit or maybe my remote control but it doesn't really have any revelance in terms of competition with 802.11 as a network interconnect and devices like cell phones allready have their own wirelss communications mechanism. Moreover the relevance and appropriateness of yet another low bitrate bus should be seriously questioned, when applications include things like trsnfering pictures off of digital cameras or moving data to printers or laptops why would we want to use a 1Mb/s transport medium when other faster options (some wired some not) are available. I fail t see for example how bluetooth would make a better interconnect than usb for example if you have to tranfer lots of data (say from a digital camera or to an mp3 player) sure you don't have to wire anything up, instead you have to wait 12x longer under ideal conditions to move the same amount of data, for that kind of hit, I'm more than happy to plug something in.

Software giants Microsoft have announced that they are withdrawing support for Bluetooth, the short range radio linking system for use between mobile computing devices. The company has announced that Windows XP, their next major operating system release, will not include support for Bluetooth because, "the maturity of Bluetooth technology is not good enough".

Microsoft originally pledged their support of the new technology as part of a consortium which included IBM, Ericsson, Nokia, Intel, and Toshiba. Their recent re-appraisal is claimed to be due to Bluetooth's failure to perform well at the CeBIT trade show in Hannover, Germany, where an attempt to create a wireless network in the conference hall using visitors' palmtop computers failed.

Cynics like myself might be left wondering if perhaps this is just the sort of excuse that Microsoft have been looking for; judging by their previous form, their next move might conceivably be to release their own version and then insist that everyone else ought to adopt it.

Commenting on his employer's decision to withdraw their support, the general manager of Microsoft's Windows division, Carl Stork, explained that they, "wouldn't want to ship something that doesn't work."

How admirable, Carl.

Main source:
http://www.teledotcom.com/article/TEL20010402S0008