News for Saturday, 21 February 2009

Final specification of the new Bluetooth format will be made available in April. The main goal is to speed up data transfer speed, the negative point of the current 2.x version. To boost the performance of the protocol, Wi-Fi will be used for transferring large files, while it will remain totally transparent for the end-user.
Interestingly, the Bluetooth hardware did not really evolve, so some BT 2.x device or notebook might be already fully compatible with the forthcoming version 3.0 if a firmware update is released for them. some manufacturers might be tempted to hide such information or not make the BT 3.0 firmware available.
It remains unclear if Apple will support the future 3.0 format with the new iPhone. So far, Apple has always quickly adopted the latest BT format when it was upgraded, however, for the version 3.0 it would involve modifying Wi-Fi access. One can also expect that current unibody MacBook models can be made BT 3.0 compatible with a simple firmware/Mac OS X update.