The first Bluetooth Low Energy chips have been made, and a new Bluetooth revolution is on its way. Bluetooth Low Energy offers an entirely new set of applications that will to change our lives for the better.

What is Bluetooth Low Energy?

Bluetooth Low Energy is pretty much what it says on the tin. It is a new Bluetooth protocol that is built on the standard Bluetooth protocol but uses incredibly small amounts of electrical energy; so little in fact that a device will be able to operate for a full year using only one tiny button cell.

How long has it been around?

Although the very first Bluetooth Low Energy chips to be manufactured appeared in April 2009, the concept has been around for a couple of years and it has been called different things. When the Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG) first came up with the concept it was called Wibree. Later it was renamed as Ultra Low Power (ULP) Bluetooth Technology, and it acquired its current name in 2009.
 

How will it be used?

Bluetooth Low Energy is the next evolution of Bluetooth and it is designed to transfer data between two devices extremely efficiently and using only a minimal amount of electrical energy. How this will work is best explained by an example.

Imagine that you are wearing a Bluetooth low energy sportswatch that monitors your heart rate and your blood pressure continually whilst you are out on a training run. Without you taking any action, your sportswatch will be able to transfer this data to your phone using Bluetooth Low Energy, and your phone will be able to transmit this data over the internet directly to your website so that you can analyse it later or so that your coach to can examine it in real time.

This is just one example and naturally there are a great many other potential applications. We will outline some more later in this article and we will describe them in depth in future articles.

Evolutionary or Revolutionary - which one is it?

So far we have referred to this new technology as revolutionary and evolutionary. This is not an error or an attempt to confuse our readers. In fact Bluetooth Low Energy is both. It is evolutionary in that it builds on conventional Bluetooth technology and extends the design experience that has been gained already, and it is revolutionary in that the new Bluetooth Low Energy protocol has been designed from scratch or, as the engineers like to say, from the bottom up. It is also revolutionary in what it will enable Bluetooth to achieve in terms of new applications and devices.

* Check out some great Bluetooth Headphone bargains at Pixmania
 

... read Part 2...

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