An upgraded Bluetooth chip is coming

March 19th, 2007 admin Posted in Mobile News |

A very popular and wide spread Bluetooth chip will get an upgrade later this year. This chip is embedded in over 1 billion devices. Kevin Keating, senior marketing manager for the Bluetooth SIG says that Bluetooth may be used by as little as 30 percent of those that have a device with the wireless capability. Bluetooth Version 2.1 + Enhanced Data Rate is the upgraded name and the capabilities are aimed on ease of use, improved performance, and power savings. Keating also noticed that the Bluetooth SIG, has more than 7,000 vendors in telecommunications, computing, and consumer electronics industries, hopes that the ease of use will spur more adoption by end users.
Bluetooth, after an improved pairing will give users the possibility to connect to another Bluetooth-enabled device in two to three steps rather than the previous version, which could actually take as many as 20 steps to connect two devices, said Keating.
The pairing has now the ability to automate securing the link and authenticating the devices as well pairing offers protection against so-called “man-in-the-middle” attacks.
While on a demonstration, Keating took a picture with a Bluetooth cell phone and paired it to a portable printer, so only with one click on the cell phone to accept the pairing before the printer printed out the picture.
Another good feature is that power consumption was also reduced by about five times putting the chip to sleep when not in use.
Version 2.1 Bluetooth will be backward-compatible with older Bluetooth devices.
As the Bluetooth Sig states the future roadmap have the use of ultra-wideband technology that makes a “Bluetooth channel” interoperable with ultra-wideband technology.
Version 2.1 is expected to ship to device manufacturers in two months.