Bluetooth a standard for short-range wireless communications between electronic devices… but the short range part of that may be a bit dated.

The Bluetooth 5.0 standard was announced in December, and it offers up to 4 times the range and up to twice the speed.

Now it looks like some of the first devices with Bluetooth 5.0 could be coming soon. A number of products have received certification for the new Bluetooth 5.0 spec, including upcoming smartphones from Samsung.

Specifically, there are listings for new phones from Samsung with model numbers including SM-G480U, SM-G485U, and GM-G480F. Based on the names, I suspect these will be variants of of a single phone rather than completely different devices.

Other companies that have received Bluetooth 5.0 certification include Chip makers Qualcomm and Broadcom and Chip designer ARM.

For the most part, you don’t really need faster speeds or better range if all you want to do with Bluetooth is beam audio to your wireless headphones or use a wireless mouse and keyboard. But the new standard could also enable Bluetooth to compete with other technologies for smart home devices including ZigBee and Z-Wave.

I’m curious to see if Samsung or other companies come up with any other interesting applications for the technology.

via TabletMonkeys

 

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5 replies on “Bluetooth 5.0 devices are on the way”

  1. Does the double-pairing capability on the S8 work with two older 4.2 speakers?

    Also, doesn’t the extra range/quality onLy work with 5.0 is on both the sending device AND the speakers?

  2. Hang on a second…. isn’t the range and quality only made possible when both the sending and receiving device is 5.0?

    Also, does the 5.0 double-pairing capability on the S8 work with, say, two older 4.2 speakers????

  3. Actually I need better range for my headset. I use skype to my computer and often am moving around and the current one doesn’t have enough range. I’d also like truly high quality audio for my headphones and BT 4.x isn’t up to the task.

  4. Bluetooth is competing with Wifi, if their practical improvements are anything like the theoretical improvements (upto 1200 feet connection, twice the connection speed and x8 times the data bandwidth compared to BT 4).

    It is to debut on the next Exynos 9 chip, and the QSD 835.
    And probably on the Apple A11/iPhone 7S/Anniversary devices.

    That means in 2017 we could have a lot of hardware/devices out in the wild with BT 5 support, and clever implementations might pop up fairly soon and painlessly. Hopefully, it won’t be like the cluster-dung that was USB-C rollout.

  5. The range improvement might make BT 5.0 more suitable for home automation than current and earlier bluetooth. But does it have ability to connect to multiple devices automatically along with mesh capability (retransmits messages from other devices)? If not, it will not be an attractive alternative to zigbee or z-wave. My impression is z-wave is most expensive, but is most capable.

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