The future is Blue?
The SIG envisages Bluetooth Low Energy being used for a wide range of applications, such as remote controls for home entertainment; temperature monitoring and control; smart energy meters; proximity sensing and much more. It makes for some novel (potential) applications.
Your phone could, for instance, be set up to lock itself if it can’t ‘see’ your Bluetooth 4.0-enabled watch, which might in turn then alert you that you left your phone behind when you left the house.
Sony Ericsson implemented ANT in its Xperia Active rather than Bluetooth 4.0
Many such tasks are being defined and written up as Bluetooth Profiles that will be embedded in the standard.
But don't forget, Bluetooth 4.0 isn’t the only game in town. Some set-top boxer makers are already including both Z-Wave and Zigbee, for instance, the better to make their kit a hub for home automation and control systems. Zigbee is being used by some energy companies for smart metering, while ANT+ is already included in some mobile phones, such as the Sony Ericsson Xperia Active, and has a range of health and fitness sensors available right now.
So will Bluetooth 4.0 triumph over these rivals? It certainly has a good chance of doing so. If it’s fully implemented in plenty of new phones, as seems likely, that should give it the critical mass required for makers of other devices to use it in place of the other standards.
Garmin's FR60 sports watch uses the company's ANT tech to get data from heart-rate monitors and such
So far, none of these has managed to achieve such momentum and don't seem likely to. However, you will almost certainly be using a mobile phone that has Bluetooth 4.0 on board before too long.
But whether you’ll be using it to keep track of your jogging, or your blood glucose will depend on how quickly the Bluetooth SIG – and competing groups like ANT – publish profiles for device makers to use. ®
WTF is... Bluetooth 4.0?
COMMENTS
file transfer?
File transfer? Over bluetooth! Hey, about time - that would come in handy! I quite often take a photo on my iphone I want to bluetooth to a friend, so that would be useful.
Ah wait, I remember.. in the dim and distant past (before I went iphone), I was able to do this with my Nokia's and Sony Ericsson's..
Apple - striving to ensure you eventually forget about the freedom you once had.
Hopefully it's better than Apples old Bluetooth support.
As nothing (Android, Nokia, SE) could send anything to an iPhone or receive anything from an iPhone over Bluetooth last time I tried. However Iphone to iPhone worked fine unsurprisingly...
Seems like Apple like to even engineer their products with intentional interoperability problems to try and force more iPhone sales..
It's quick and simple
I use it a fair bit; only a couple of weeks ago, I was entertaining a gentleman caller and the simplest way to get the photos he'd taken was to send them via Bluetooth from his HTC to my Nokia; quick, very easy, no need to wait for slugging spam filters and internet connections to do their work. And no chance of anyone else seeing the pictures, either.
If I take snaps when out and about on my phone, again, it's simple and quick to just send them by BT to the laptop.
Sometimes I don't want to fiddle around uploading to a website, setting privacy options, and so on. I just want to get a picture or pictures from one device to another, easily and quickly. And Bluetooth, on many devices, is actually jolly good for doing that.
Security Settings
BT has a "High Security" setting which forces the device to do "device pairing" before being able to connect to the other device. Some smartphones are even locked into said mode for security reasons.
You mean the iPhone can't do that?
OBEX is still part of Bluetooth 4.0, Apple.
The air-interface is only one part of the standard.
But hey, I just love to use my data allowance to email media files from my phone to an iPhone owner who's standing in front of me. It's the future, etc., etc.
Somewhat schizophrenically, Apple's implementation of Bluetooth on OSX is really top-notch.
