Intel Claims Bluetooth is Dead

[Jerry Raia]

<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://www.mobileburn.com/news.jsp?Id=1193' target='_blank'>http://www.mobileburn.com/news.jsp?Id=1193</a><br /><br /></div><i>"Intel claims that Wireless USB (WUSB) will kill off Bluetooth. It's designed to be used at ranges of less than 10 metres and will allow peak data speeds of 480Mbps, which is right in the Bluetooth heartland. The first retail products will be in the shops within a year."</i><br /><br /><img src="http://www.smartphonethoughts.com/images/bluetooth.gif" alt="User submitted image" title="User submitted image"/><br /><br />Yawn. Gee no one has ever predicted this before.:roll: Look, we all know technology comes and goes. Bluetooth has been around for a quite a while now and its demise or failure have been predicted for about the same length of time. I wouldn't put much money on Intel's predictions, about Bluetooth or their own chips for that matter. :lol:

[xultar]

I will admit. I was a NAY Sayer! I predicted the death of BlueTooth.

Now I love it.

I think Bluetooth is here to stay. There's room for lots of wireless stuff as long as the signals don't degrade due to cross traffic.

I'll sing the prases of BT.

How will they do wifi usb on a wireless phone anywaze?

[surur]

Since when was 480Mb/sec bluetooth territory? I know bluetooth 2 will be faster, but only 2-3 times, not orders of magnitude.

Surur

[Jerry Raia]

It's not too hard to see why Intel is predicting this. Hop over to deviceforge.com (http://www.deviceforge.com/articles/AT9015145687.html) where you will see this:

"At the Spring 2004 Intel Developer Forum, formation of the Wireless USB Promoter Group was announced. The group is comprised of seven industry leaders: Agere Systems, HP, Intel, Microsoft Corporation, NEC, Philips Semiconductors and Samsung Electronics."

I bet all the players on this list would make the same "prediction" but especially the chip makers.


:lol:

[Islanti]

The only thing that's interesting about WUSB is the lack of profiles. This is good and bad, as I see it.

Bluetooth profiles are great except when your device doesn't support a particular profile for some reason. If it does, though, you're pretty much set. If not, forget about an upgrade without buying new hardware for the most part (thanks to WIDCOMM's crappy upgrade policy and Microsoft's crappy support of BT). This only gets worse as more and more new uses for BT come around. There's a lot of lag in implementing these new profiles.

WUSB would require the device manufacturers to write drivers for their products as I understand the WUSB specification (similar to USB today). The issue here is that we may never see good drivers from some manufacturers for WM platforms. That'd be really unfortunate, since it would severely limit the usefullness of WUSB on a WM device.

All in all, I guess I'd rather stick with BT, since it's a more mature technology. The basic functionality is mostly there, anyway.

[Jerry Raia]

....and Microsoft's crappy support of BT

MS is on that list too :)

[Stinger]

The really vital thing for me is power consumption.

I can leave bluetooth on all day, but wifi kills my PDA dead in an hour or less. If they can acheive those speeds, whilst maintaining low power consumption, then I'm all for it. :)