Bluetooth 4.0 standard, with low energy consumption has been finalized. This technology will allow the appearance of a whole new range of devices and applications that people cannot imagine today. Domains like healthcare, sports and fitness, security, and home entertainment, will benefit by implementing new standard communications into these. Machines will be able to exchange data with other devices, removing wire transmissions.  Reliability of new technology will recommend it to be adopted for small range data transmissions combined with very low power consumption.

The standard will have two ways of implementation: single-mode where the technology will enable integration of chips in compact devices, providing ultra-low power idle mode operation, and multipoint and encrypted data transfers with very low costs.   In dual-mode the chip is integrated into an existing Bluetooth controller, resulting a similar way to use, as a classic Bluetooth, but with very low costs.

Technical details for Bluetooth 4.0 are: 1 Mbps speed with very low energy consumption, working with the same frequencies as all Bluetooth technologies to avoid interferences with devices that use 2.4 GHz band, the capability to stay in idle mode for long period of times and to enable transfers only when a request is made by another Bluetooth device,  cover range is 100m as classic Bluetooth, safe transfer – using 128 bits AES data encryption, star topology for multipoint transfer, allowing data exchange between devices.

Bluetooth 4.0

via Engadget