Friday, February 20, 2004
The Death of Bluetooth: Intel Moves to Ultrawideband
Posted by Ed Hansberry in "NEWS" @ 03:00 PM
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.
"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.
