Bye Bye Bluetooth | Hacker News Reader

Bye Bye Bluetooth

techdusts.com

27 pointsmayank25may15 comments

Come 2010 and no longer would you be using Bluetooth for short range file transfer. Apple, Intel, Cisco (and other major players) along with WiFi Alliance have together come with a set of standards for WiFi Direct. This will convert you Wifi gadget into a access point.

Open articleView on HN

I always thought Bluetooth was optimised for low power wireless transfer of modest amounts of data (e.g. mouse and keyboard, voice or music), not full on file transfer.

Don’t get me wrong, I would really like to say bye to Bluetooth and switch everything over to Wifi, but I don’t think Wifi is optimised for low power (the typical Bluetooth use cases) just yet. Or is it?

File transfer with bluetooth was always very slow. I use a USB thumbdrive for any kind of short range data transfer. Heck, even sending files over the internet (IM or E-Mail) seems always much more convenient than bothering with bluetooth.

the main advantage of bluetooth is not it's "direct" connectivity. It's its low power consumption. Which makes it suitable for mobile gizmos. So it wont vanish anytime soon.

Indeed. We're probably only a standard or two away from Bluetooth officially becoming the 'low power' wifi standard and a spec that allows devices to initiate connections with lower overhead and scale up to higher bandwidths if and when necessary.

i will not agree here... The battery life is incresing at a very fast pace and it wont be long when the amount of power wifi sucks will be very small when compared to the over all battery life.

Battery life historically has been an issue, and solutions historically have been just over the horizon. We are seeing improvements however, low power consumption is still a factor.

I guess we will just get smaller devices, then.

Does anyone know about the royalty situation for this stuff? Bluetooth would have been far more useful if the rights holders hadn't been so greedy in its early days.

Zigbee, a simplified successor to Bluetooth, has become pretty important to industrial and power grid computing; WPAN wifi was around when those standards were drafted. I don't think direct wi-fi is an automatic win.

This is such a poorly written article. Is it translated?

I much preferred the BBC's description, even if it was a little "layman": http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8307977.stm

The one paragraph in their story about the "threat" to bluetooth was far more fair than all the other stories I've seen on HN about Wifi Alliance.

It will be interested to see how Bluetooth 3.0+HS (Bluetooth+WiFi, backed by Broadcom/CSR) and WiFi Direct (My WiFi, backed by Intel) compete with each other.

But I think Bonjour may be the biggest winner if WiFi Direct wins since, unlike Bluetooth profiles, WiFi Direct doesn't include any application layer. Bonjour will fit in the need of service discovery protocol.

The only thing I've ever used bluetooth for is audio; my cell phone has it, my iPod has an adaptor for it, and I have a pretty acceptable set of headphones that receive it. I'm also planning on getting a car stereo that supports it. Has file transfer every really been a use-case for bluetooth?

- Automated connectivity between your cell phone and the hands free set in a car. - Backing up the cell phone

Getting pictures off of cellphones.

Does anyone know how this will work in practice? Will I have to disconnect from my WLAN to connect to the device's? What's the benefit compared to an ad-hoc network, in the peer-to-peer file transfer case?

bluetooth 3.0 HS (High Speed) standard is going to provide high speed transfer in comparision with Wi-Fi without consuming lot of power. So can't say bye bye to blurtooth so early. Have patience..

Reply on news.ycombinator.com