Bluetooth Improves, Shipments Grow

The Bluetooth Special Interest Group, the standards body for Bluetooth, has announced a new version of Bluetooth named "Enhanced Data Rate" (EDR) which promises enhancements over the existing Bluetooth version. EDR will bump speeds to 2.1Mbps from the current 0.7, and will allow more flexible connections when products hit the market in early 2005. Power consumption, extremely important in the mobile devices that will use Bluetooth, is halved in the EDR version. Bluetooth, originally slow to market (pre 2002) is now accelerating. After hitting the 1M chips per week mark 9 months ago, Bluetooth is now shipping in over 2M chips per week. That's a phenomenal growth rate. Analysts that were Bluetooth detractors made the mistake of comparing Bluetooth against other rivals that didn't yet exist, like UWB. UWB sounds great on paper, but needs to actually exist in commercial silicon to pose any credible threat. These analsyst also compared a 1998 version of Bluetooth with 2006 versions of vapor technologies, forgetting that Bluetooth, too, would improve over time. When we wrote about Bluetooth last October, it had just crossed the 1M/week mark, and we felt that the momentum assured Bluetooth a role for years to come. We stand firm.

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