Bluetooth 4.0 Coming Later This Year

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Bluetooth 4 is expected to appear in products by the end of the year.

The Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG) said on Wednesday that version 4.0 of the wireless specification may be incorporated into devices by the end of the year. The new spec will bring Bluetooth to a whole new set of gadgets including watches, pedometers, and all other low-power devices that run on coin-cell batteries.

The IGD News Service reports that Bluetooth 4.0 won't offer users a major improvement in actual battery life-- only a nominal improvement at best. Foley provided an example, saying that Bluetooth 4.0 radios will see the same battery drain as Bluetooth 3.0 radios when used to sync headphones to music players, or to connect smartphones to laptops.

Charles Golvin, principal analyst at Forrester Research, said that Bluetooth 4.0 will be better than the competition because it can be deployed across a wide variety of devices, giving the tech a head start over the other technologies. Unfortunately, the data transfer rate hasn't improved: Bluetooth still shoots data from device to device at a maximum rate of 24Mb/s (BT 3.0 + HS).

Kevin Parrish
Kevin Parrish
Contributor

Kevin Parrish has over a decade of experience as a writer, editor, and product tester. His work focused on computer hardware, networking equipment, smartphones, tablets, gaming consoles, and other internet-connected devices. His work has appeared in Tom's Hardware, Tom's Guide, Maximum PC, Digital Trends, Android Authority, How-To Geek, Lifewire, and others.

6 Comments Comment from the forums
  • industrial_zman
    what?!? when did they release bluetooth 3.0? shouldn't this be like bluetooth 3.1 instead, like they did with 1.0 to 1.1 to 1.2 and 2.0 to 2.1 with edr? or can't they can tack on a suffix like intel does with their low powered devices (LV, ULV). it looks like they are just trying to play the numbers game seeing "how man generations can we fluff our numbers with" without having any real performance difference.
    Reply
  • freiheitner
    I'm still waiting for a version of Bluetooth which works more than 50% of the time. Name brand USB Bluetooth dongle, name brand Bluetooth headphones, full OS support, they always "pair" but usually fail to "connect". Or they disconnect if I switch to a different app which also plays music.
    Reply
  • JimTech
    I'd like to see Bluetooth items (like headsets) work as well as wired cousins. I have never found a BT headset to sound anywhere close to a wired headset either in my opinion or "the listener".
    Reply
  • reciprocalinhibition
    I use A2DP Audio Profile to link my cell phone(s) to my car stereo, but the quality is still terrible because of echo. The second scratch is that Andriod won't play FLAC, and regardless BT doesn't have enough bandwidth to stream loss-less audio anyways. Other than for data transfer the technology is overrated.

    BT for sound transmission is a major FAIL!

    Back to the drawing board please. This technology seems to have major potential, but currently I rate it slightly more useful than a Ham radio.
    Reply
  • reciprocalinhibition
    and where is this BT 3.0 with "device to device at a maximum rate of 24Mb/s (BT 3.0 + HS)"

    Marketing FAIL
    Reply
  • dante10
    4.0 already?
    Reply