Chip makers Atheros and Broadcom are already working on 3.0 hardware, and we should see consumer products with Bluetooth 3.0 in around 9 to 12 months. Bluetooth 3.0 will be backwards-compatible, so you'll be able to use new devices with your existing Bluetooth 2.1-toting gear. In fact, the 802.11 radio stays off until you actually start transferring data. Potentially, that means you could do things such as stream video from a camcorder to an HDTV or zap a batch of photos to a printer.Ĭoncentrate, average consumer! Actually, that's relevant, because Bluetooth 3.0 is designed to avoid the battery-draining cost of leaving the current version on all the time.
That means file transfer will be much faster than present Bluetooth speeds, and much larger files can be moved. What this means for you is that Bluetooth 3.0 will pair the two methods of transferring data, but actual data transfer will take place over Wi-Fi at around 24Mbps.
