The Bluetooth industry is anything but blue, as a new enhanced flavor of Bluetooth promises to reduce power consumption and increase bandwidth, all while shipments continue to rise.
The Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG), the organization that is responsible for defining and maintaining the Bluetooth wireless standard, has announced a new prototype specification named "Enhanced Data Rate" (EDR).
The as-yet not formal specification aims to provide faster data transmission and reduce power consumption at the same time, offering up to three times the data rate of conventional Bluetooth devices. It also makes it possible to use multiple Bluetooth functions simultaneously, or actively communicate with more devices thanks to the increased bandwidth. The reduced power consumption is also expected to as much as double the battery life of Bluetooth-using devices.
Bluetooth 1.2, the most recent published spec, has a maximum data rate of 721 kbps. EDR, by contrast, has a maximum data rate of 2.1 Mbps, faster than some broadband connections. It achieves that extra speed by changing the frequency management system used by the specification. It is backward compatible, however, as the basic structure of the protocol remains unchanged. When speaking to older devices, EDR devices would fall back to the slower speeds. The SIG expects the specification to be finalized some time this fall, with products appearing in 2005.
There should be quite a demand for them, too. Less than nine months after reaching 1 million shipments per week, worldwide shipments of Bluetooth-equipped products have now topped 2 million per week. Mobile phones, handhelds, laptops, and accessories remained the big sellers, even though Bluetooth has found its way into many other products as well. Approximately 150 million Bluetooth-equipped devices have shipped to date, a number that is certain to grow quickly (by about 2 million per week).
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