You may have heard the term Bluetooth used previously in connection with things like mobile phones, digital cameras, and laptop computers, but with so much techno jargon flying around nowadays, you’d be forgiven for not knowing what it means.
Bluetooth is a wireless communications technology intended to pass digital information between electronic appliances across small distances. Bluetooth manages to avoid interference problems is by using a technique known as spread-spectrum frequency hopping, which involves the transmission frequency changing 1600 times per second between the 80 distinct radio frequencies that are employed by Bluetooth devices.
Bluetooth technology is now so ubiquitous that many of the major mobile phone service providers such as 3 and Vodafone now offer free wireless Bluetooth accessories such as headsets with the majority of their mobile phone bundles.
Bluetooth devices automatically form a basic wireless network connection with any other bluetooth devices available within a 10 metre area. If two devices are permitted to communicate by the user, for instance, if you had set up your printer to talk to your mobile phone via Bluetooth, they would instantly recognise each other’s presence and begin talking to each other when brought within this radius. The max data transfer speed is 720Mbit/second, which is comparable with most basic broadband connections. You can connect up to eight Bluetooth devices together simultaneously, although data transfer between them may be slower as they all have to make use of the same 720Mbit data transfer throughput between them.
This revolutionary new technology has a number of potential uses. To date, however, by far the most popular use for the protocol has been to provide mobile phone users with a method of talking on their mobile phones remotely, that is to say, away from the mobile phone itself, using a Bluetooth headset or similar device. The advantages of this are twofold. Firstly, it allows you to talk hands-free, leaving your hands available for more pressing matters such as operating a vehicle or tapping away at a keyboard. Secondly, due to the low power rating of Bluetooth transmitters, you are exposed to much less in the way of heat and potentially harmful radiation than if you had used a wired headset or your mobile handset.
Bluetooth technology is now so ubiquitous that many of the major mobile phone service providers such as 3 and Vodafone now offer free wireless Bluetooth accessories such as headsets with the majority of their mobile phone bundles.
