Defying some incredible odds, upstart wireless technology Bluetooth has made it to the ripe old age of 10 years old.
Bluetooth began its life with the creation of the Bluetooth SIG (Special Interest Group), which started in 1998 with just five companies looking to create a short-range wireless system for allowing personal items like cell phones, laptops, headsets, and keyboards to talk to one another. By the end of the year, 400 companies were SIG members.
2000 brought the first phone and headset to use Bluetooth to hit the market (those are them, pictured above). Laptops got Bluetooth in 2001, cameras in 2002, MP3 players in 2003. Today, the Bluetooth SIG has 9,000 member companies and has placed 2 billion Bluetooth-enabled products onto the market.
Pretty impressive for a technology that no one originally thought much of (early Bluetooth was buggy, slow, and fairly useless). But my, how things have changed. Bluetooth support is now a major selling point for cell phones; many buyers are now in love with their wireless headsets. Not having Bluetooth is almost unthinkable on all but the very cheapest of cell phones.
Today, Bluetooth's wide support threatens to keep alternatives like Wireless USB from achieving mass acceptance. In fact, Bluetooth 3.0 is slated to include technologies like Ultra Wideband (UWB) as part of its new specification. As well, an ultra-low power version is in the works for medical devices, watches, and other super-small products. When will it end?
Happy birthday, Blue!
Source : http://tech.yahoo.com/blogs/null/65985;_ylt=AjiTisy1_eO9chEnAEmfoVQFLZA5
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