standards

The Bluetooth 4.0 Killer Feature: Low Energy Consumption

The Bluetooth SIG just announced the new features of Bluetooth 4.0. Instead of focusing on speed, they chose to make this release extremely energy efficient.

How efficient is Bluetooth 4.0? Apparently, it’s so efficient that it could run for years on a tiny lithium battery. Now that’s efficient!

Bluetooth 4.0 Features

Ultra-low peak, average and idle mode power consumption
Ability to run for years on standard coin-cell batteries
Low cost
Multi-vendor interoperability
Enhanced range

Engadget speculates that they expect to see hardware supporting Bluetooth 4.0 as soon as Q4 of 2010.

How Fast is USB 3.0?

February 22, 2010 By Jon Henshaw

Just how fast is USB 3.0 compared to USB 2.0 and FireWire 800? It’s crazy fast! USB 2.0 has a maximum data transfer speed of 480mbps, and FireWire 800 has a maximum speed of 800mbps. USB 3.0 shatters those speeds with a maximum data throughput of 4.8gbps! Yup, that’s 4,800mbps!

New Features of USB 3.0

GigaOM posted several new features of USB 3.0. These are my favorites:

Did I mention it was 4.8gbps?
Fully backwards compatible (as expected)
It’s more energy efficient
Backed by every major company

USB 3.0 Hardware

There still isn’t a lot of hardware available for USB 3.0 yet, but what is available is getting good reviews. For example, this USB 3.0 external hard drive is already getting rave reviews for reliability and speed. If you have a desktop computer that accepts PCI cards, you can upgrade your computer now with this USB 3.0 PCI card and one of these cables.