02-20-2004, 11:00 PM
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Contributing Editor Emeritus
Join Date: Aug 2006
Posts: 8,228
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The Death of Bluetooth: Intel Moves to Ultrawideband
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/zd/20040219/tc_zd/119654
"At the Intel Developer Forum on Wednesday Intel announced the company was giving up on the deadlocked Ultrawideband IEEE task group and going it alone with a derivative offering they are calling Wireless USB. This initiative, for them, does everything that Bluetooth does and, effectively means that for PCs Bluetooth is all but dead."
"Intel's history with Bluetooth, up until now, was solid. It was one of the major backers but the technology took years longer then expected to come to market. It's really never been accepted as a PC standard. Even Microsoft was slow to adopt it due to concerns about the standard. The company's Bluetooth keyboard and mouse were a disaster."
I know bluetooth is still popular in cell phones in Europe, but they are hard (not impossible) to find here in the US. Very few PC peripherals have bluetooth. I suspect most consumer applications for bluetooth here involve PDAs to cell phones or BT routers. As WiFi is getting more common place, the bluetooth wireless networks are dying fast. With devices like the Motorola MPx300 having built in cellular technology in a form factor that is really appealing, users like me that prefer the dual device solution will quickly move to the all-in-one PDA/Phone devices now that you don't have to have such a large device up to your ear. This article lists the same complaints that users have with bluetooth. It is too often troublesome to set up. If bluetooth is supposed to replace a cable, it should be as drop dead simple to work as a cable. Infrared is, bluetooth isn't. Yeah, I know, WiFi isn't as easy to set up, but people don't have that expectation of WiFi. They may not like it, but they anticipate fiddling with something to get a home network up and working. They do not expect to do that when getting an infrared mouse working with their PC and they don't expect it for bluetooth - mainly because bluetooth has billed itself as an easy to use cable replacement. Perhaps that is bluetooth's biggest failure - it wasn't marketed right.
Well, Intel has moved on. If it fails in the simplicity of ultrawideband, it too will fail. Somehow though, I think Intel learned the lesson of bluetooth and won't make the same mistake.
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02-20-2004, 11:02 PM
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Intellectual
Join Date: Aug 2003
Posts: 174
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How many more times is Bluetooth going to die? :lol:
Seriously though, UWB (or rather Wireless USB) sounds like a more reasonable standard. Hopefully Intel (and others) will avoid past mistakes this time around.
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02-20-2004, 11:15 PM
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Intellectual
Join Date: Nov 2006
Posts: 148
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Don't toss out your Bluetooth-enabled handheld quite yet. According to an internetnews.com article:
Quote:
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The group plans to deliver the 1.0 version of the specification by the end of 2004, with the first products expected about a year later.
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So we're talking about roughly two years before the first Wireless USB dongles hit the market.
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02-20-2004, 11:17 PM
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Theorist
Join Date: Aug 2006
Posts: 302
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This whole Bluetooth thing has been very interesting to see play out. I just saw a new Bluetooth GPS receiver for notebooks advertised the other day. I guess it's technically still dying...a slow death.
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02-20-2004, 11:24 PM
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Theorist
Join Date: Apr 2004
Posts: 262
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Long live bluetooth !
I mean come on, it just makes life easier. I hate headphones on a cell phone, but a BT headset is just so easy.
I have a GPS receiver wire connected to my iPaq in my car, this week I got the chance to test a TomTom BT GPS receiver, it's just so easy that I wish I could trade in mine ;-)
BT might be obscure (or difficult to understand) in the US, but it's here and it's great in Europe !
Btw, BT is easy when it's implemented in consumer products and truely acts as a cable replacement. Every time MS touches BT, they criple it (BT implementation in XP is not existend, making it difficult to set up BT activesync and their wireless keyboard debacle proves that Ed is the BT engineer at microsoft :lol: )
Ivan
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02-20-2004, 11:29 PM
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Intellectual
Join Date: Feb 2002
Posts: 226
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...and before the rants begin, the title of the post is the title of the linked article. Yahoo News, not Ed, is calling Intel's move "the death of Bluetooth".
(not that Ed disagrees, I'm sure, but Duncan, et al can't blame him for this one.)
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02-20-2004, 11:35 PM
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Ponderer
Join Date: Jul 2003
Posts: 83
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Funny, it reminds me of a company called Cypress who actually have a product called wirelessUSB It is definitely not based on UWB since it operates in the 2.4GHz frequency band. Which makes me wonder what the bandwidth is like, certainly less than UWB can offer.
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02-20-2004, 11:37 PM
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Pupil
Join Date: Mar 2004
Posts: 11
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Re: The Death of Bluetooth: Intel Moves to Ultrawideband
Sigh...just when it was starting to win me over.
I was one of the Bluetooth naysayers until I realized what it was really all about, and now I'm starting becoming a fan of the technology.
Where I work, a University in Canada, wifi is heavily restricted and it makes using my iPAQ for things other than web surfing a bit of a hassle. Since Bluetooth is not regulated :wink: , I went out and got a USB dongle and I love it. (And I am really looking forward to the Bluetooth portable keyboards too.)
Ah well, like someone said earlier...Bluetooth has been pronounced dead more times than I can count. Who knows if this is really it...
David
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02-20-2004, 11:39 PM
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Theorist
Join Date: Apr 2004
Posts: 262
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After thinking this through, this is a good thing for bluetooth.
The BT forum can continu on focusing what BT is meant to be , just a low power cable replacement for consumer devices like phones, headsets, gps receivers, carkits, some digital camera's etc...
This wireless USB thingie can take the load off BT by offering what BT never was meant to do...
Think about it 
Ivan
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02-20-2004, 11:41 PM
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Mystic
Join Date: Aug 2006
Posts: 1,734
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Bluetooth is picking up and improving. By the time UWB gets implemented, bluetooth will be in the place of USB, and UWB may be like firewire, very nice, but a niche product.
Currently I'm on my second PDA with bluetooth, and will not buy one without it. Having bought one bluetooth peripheral one does become locked in to the standard, but in a good way, as your device should be compatible and easily transferable to another PDA (unlike proprietary connectors for e.g. keyboards and GPS units)
Anyways, I have heard that UWB will be implemented in the form of a bluetooth stack and protocol. It would be the ultimate irony if UWB just turns into bluetooth 3.
Surur
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