Should We Give Up On Bluetooth?

Audent asks: "I've been reading (and writing) about 'Bluetooth ^[?] Coming Soon!' for what seems like years now... Is it time to give up? Where are the products? Where are the new devices that promise piconetworks and the like? And what about the risks from having an entire network of Bluetoothed devices beaming around this already saturated office of mine (100 people plus PCs plus printers, scanners, laptops, palmtops, cellphones times Bluetooth equals...?) I know they run on the same band as microwave ovens (2.4GHz) but they won't interfere with each other but are we all going to be cooked by these tiny chips? Or will Bluetooth take off in the way USB did once the first products came out in commercial quantities?" Bluetooth sounds great on paper, but have life's realities proven too much in terms of getting working implementations out of the door?

Bluetooth available

[Snowfox]

It's a bit premature to give up on Bluetooth. As the author says, USB didn't catch on quickly either.

USB caught on because of Apple's initial adoption of the technology. People were used to paying a premium for Mac peripherals, which made targetting USB desireable.

Today, Bluetooth is just starting to appear in laptops. (I'm buying a Dell Inspiron 8000 with Bluetooth support. Bluetooth is now shipping.) Again, with laptops, people are used to paying a premium for most peripherals. And once there are enough people with Bluetooth-ready laptops out there, just waiting to spend a few bucks to use them, we can expect to see hardware manufacturers racing for the opportunity to charge the premium prices.

---
My opinions are mine.

Vaporware with great potential

[Matt_Bennett]

Bluetooth has been, and is right now, largely vaporware, though it is slowly gaining ground. The first big hurdle has been cheap, integrated chipsets, and we should have good, mass produced silicon very soon, if it isn't here already (if they are here, they've come in the past 6 months). Once the installed base is here, we'll need the infrastructure to support it, unfortunately, no-one will build the infrastructure, until there is a large installed base. When the larger infrastructure is in place, the demand will rise. Right now, we have no infrastructure, and therefore no demand. This is why the Bluetooth silicon makers have pretty much only talked to the big players in the electronics industry, like Nokia, and the big computer manufacturers. I used to work for a smaller manufacturer of devices, and the Bluetooth silicon vendors didn't want to talk to us when we were talking about paltry volumes of 10-50K units/year.

This is much like what happened with cellular phones- at first a neat gadget, but not very useful due to the lack of coverage, then better coverage, but awfully expensive, and now we are at the point where the coverage is pretty extensive and the costs can rival a landline. The demand for ubiquitous networking is growing- something will fill the gap.

What, give up?!?

[Bud]

Hey, Bluetooth has been in the making for several years but it's definitely not outdated! On the contrary, it's just on time.

• The speed of Bluetooth (up to 115kbps) is enough for most uses.
  
• Power requirements are LOW (milliwatts) making the chips very embeddable.
  
• No line-of-sight required! This will create a new breed of interconnected devices -- lots of small specialized gadgets that live in your coat pocket or your bag and don't do very much on their own -- but what little they do, they do extremely well. (Compare to the Unix way, with hundreds of specialized command line utilities.)
  
• Authentication and encryption -- only you can connect to your mobile phone.
  
• Bluetooth is reputedly a sturdier protocol than WLAN, meaning that it won't suffer as much from clashes. (OK, the microwave oven is the clear winner here...)
  
• The first Bluetooth-enabled devices are appearing on the market NOW.
  

Bluetooth is going to be a winner.

--Bud

The only problem with bluetooth is...

[orev]

The only problem with bluetooth is that some tech writer got wind of it long before it was ready, and started telling everyone about it. It's developing very well, and there is a new version of the spec (1.1) on its way RSN. Most developers are waiting for that release.

Just think about the technology, even if it doesn't blow the doors off everything like everyone says it will, it's still very useful and will be picked up in the right applications. It might need the right application to really get going (look at IrDA and Palm pilots), but it'll be really cool.

... and let's give up on Nanotech while were at it

[Ratface]

This just gets my goat! As the pace of computing moves on at an ever increasing rate the patience of people wears ever thinner it seems. I don't know whether it's the press' fault, or what but Bluetooth is a technology that hasn't had time to develop yet. Of course, having made a song and dance about it over a year ago may have harmed the public perception of the technology, but it has probably also kick-started a huge amount of development and investment necessary to get the first products out the door.

A similar thing seems to have happened with WAP where the initial hype which has started innovation and development is now causing a backlash by people who don't have the patience, or the background to understand that technologies take time to develop.

<sarcasm>
... but then of course the entire Internet *did* spring up in the last 5 years so how hard can it be?
</sarcasm>

"Give the anarchist a cigarette"

Give it a chance

[Bob_T_Bold]

USB 1.0 took many years (like 4) to become commercially viable. 802.11 has taken even longer. Bluetooth is next. When USB first became available, nothing supported it, even if it had USB on the motherboard, it didn't mean that the drivers were available, or that there was anything to plug into the port. In addition, it took a while before enough USB enabled devices became available to make it worthwhile, and the cost hit a point where people could build a mouse with it (the controller for a mouse has to be as cheap as absolutly possible). 802.11 is in the middle phase right now, where people are starting to adopt it, but the technology is still a bit expensive. But the costs there are dropping rapidly as more people deploy the technology. Bluetooth is in the beginning phase still. The silicon has just finally become available in any kind of quantity, and it is still very expensive (would you pay $400 for a Bluetooth enabled wireless mouse?). But the capabilities that the techonology will enable are imense, even though there are still some major hurdles to overcome (like the piconet overload problem). However, once the cost of the chips drops to something reasonable, I think you will see your stowaway keyboard become bluetooth enabled, and then it will work with any bluetooth enabled PDA, your cell phone, or even you PC. It is the little things like that that will really make the technology take off. Robert

I have a vision for bluetooth..

[TheTomcat]

or a bluetooth-like protocol.

Where your wireless keyboard will control whatever of your computers you want.. physical KVM switches may become obsolete. Where I'll be able to type text into my Visor, if there's a bluetooth keyboard around, or X10 will be able to produce wireless devices with ease. My PDA will control my television, and not through that dinky IR port either. I'll be able to close the blinds, or dim the lights, with a GUI on my PDA, AS I'm walking up the stairs to my apartment.

It's possible now.. just REALLY expensive.

S

Re:I have a vision for bluetooth..

[harriscohen]

You can retro-fit almost anything with a pulse and a serial port quite cheaply with the BLuetooth adapters from www.brainboxes.com HC

Bluetooth has one problem

[anticypher]

One that comes up regularly on slashdot. Intellectual Property.

Bluetooth uptake is being limited by the lack of free (as in liberty) development environments. Similar to the way rambus sat on memory development committees and then ran out and patented everything. Similar to WAP and the patents and overbearing licensing schemes of phone.com. Bluetooth is heavily encumbered by IP, and it is frightening off many developers who are uncertain if their early investment will be stolen away by another rambus once they start to make a profit.

There have been a few feeble verbal promises by bluetooth IP holders not to stifle innovation by legal action, but nobody believes them. A friend who regularly attends all WAP and Bluetooth conferences says that you can hear the name rambus muttered in every side conversation. Ericsson and others make statements only lawyers could love, with all kinds of disclaimers to their promises, such as "during the startup phase, we will not actively enforce our patents" or "other IP holders who have properly cross-licensed our proprietary need not worry about future lawsuits".

Universities who have been licensed to play with early development kits have very restricted clauses. No student may create any freely available code, driver, technical description or hardware improvement. All improvements by students become the property of the original bluetooth group. It defeats the GPL before it can even be applied. And every university is required to obtain signatures from every student who uses bluetooth development kits before they ever set eyes on it. That is why several universities have turned them down, for infringing on academic freedom, although for every good uni, there is a greedy one who would sell out their students rights.

Once cheap development units become publically available, we'll have to see what kind of freedom we have to develop killer applications and protocols. If the bluetooth IP owners keep their promises and don't unleash the lawyers on free implementations, then bluetooth will become a great success. Until then, it looks to most as another doomed proprietary system.

the AC

Bluetooth - Is it WAP or USB ?

[dingbat_hp]

Bluetooth has certainly taken surprisingly long to appear. I now have 802.11 devices I never expected to have, because I thought they'd go straight to Bluetooth. The Bluetooth kit that is out is also staggering expensive (a 200 quid DECT phone goes to 500 with Bluetooth).

The same thing happened with USB. Why did I buy my last scanner with a pain-in-the-ass SCSI interface, when I knew all along that I really wanted USB, but just couldn't get them yet ? In the end though, I'm now happily using it - maybe two years after I expected it to become pervasive.

USB wasn't a failure, and isn't a failure now. It does something useful, it's cheap, and it got there eventually.

So why has WAP been such an unmitigated disaster ? (and for the Americans reading this, it's yet another cellphone technology where Europe is far ahead of you).

IMHO, WAP failed because it wasn't adventurous enough. The tiny deck size limit was too rigidly fixed around a phone-sized display, just as PDAs were gaining radio links. Although WAP was capable (barely) of driving a Yellow-Pages interface, it ran out of steam for ordering pizza/

I'm still not sure about Bluetooth. I don't like it, because (like WAP) I see some huge limitations in how far they've pushed it. Making my phone headset talk to my fridge ? Yes, it will do that. Maybe (radio permitting) we'll all have Bluetooth phone headsets like Lt. Uhura in a couple of years.

The thing I'm really unsure of about Bluetooh are the discovery protocols. It's one thing to make my phone talk to my fridge, but what about all that useful stuff I'm already doing with my IR Palm and someone else's hardware ? How do you "beam" a business card between two Bluetooth PDAs if they've never been introduced before ? How do you stop everyone in radio range overhearing it too ? How can Bluetooth support a railway season ticket, so that I'm let through the barrier, but not the guy in front ? IMHO, the Bluetooth SDP is painfully weak on these areas - yet they're the areas of neo-Gibson tech that I want to be inventing (and buying) in the next few years.

LEDs (and laser diodes) keep getting better and better. Will we see IrDA making a comeback, on the back of more powerful optics, longer range, and a simple to understand line-of-sight discovery protocol ?

PS - And Bluetooth should fix their damned website [bluetooth.com] if they want developers to adopt it. How can I judge the spec if it takes an hour to download it ?