Bluetooth is one of the two main competing wireless standards, the other being WiFi (aka 802.11b). Conceived initially by Ericsson, Bluetooth is basically a small, cheap radio chip which can be plugged into anything from computers and printers to mobile phones and keyboards. A Bluetooth chip is designed to replace cables by taking the information normally carried by the cable, and transmitting it at a special frequency to a receiver Bluetooth chip, which will then give the information received to the computer, phone whatever.
Today we are looking at a few Bluetooth enabled gadgets the fine people at X-Micro were kind enough to send us. X-Micro is predominantly a high-end graphics card supplier, but they have branched out into many other fields covering everything from USB pen drives to MP3 players and Modems.
Some considerable coverage has been given to the Bluetooth vs. Wifi debate, but in reality it should be a non starter, as the two standards have different applications. First up is speed. Bluetooth operates at a maximum speed of 720kb/s compared to 11Mb/s for Wifi. This makes Bluetooth much too slow to effectively manage large networks where copious amounts of data are transferring through. However Bluetooth is not really designed to compete with Wifi in this way. Bluetooth devices advertise their capabilities to others, and any single device can be connected to up to seven others simultaneously. This makes it very easy to switch between the devices you are looking for and no fancy management skills are needed at all. WiFi conversely requires the same degree of management as any other Network, wired or otherwise.
Bluetooth chips are also substantially smaller than their WiFi equivalents, making them perfect for syncronising PDAs, mobiles and other dinky products. If you check out the size of our Wifi network adaptor – one of the smallest available – the difference between it and the Bluetooth devices over the next pages should make that distinction clear. As a footnote, if you were wondering why Bluetooth is so-called, it is named after a Danish Viking and King, Harald Blåtand (translated as Bluetooth in English), who lived in the latter part of the 10th century. Harald Blåtand united and controlled Denmark and Norway (hence the inspiration on the name: uniting devices through Bluetooth).
