Nokia launches BlueTooth
competitor
Nokia today announced a new low-power, short-range wireless networking technology called Wibree. Wibree is based on an open industry specification and offers ranges comparable to BlueTooth with a data rate of 1 Mbps. It's main value, however, is small size, low power, cheap chips.
Bob Iannucci of Nokia Research Center told DDJ's Blog that Wibree is better than BlueTooth because it uses variable length packets that allows it to scale much smaller than BlueTooth's fixed length packet system. The first commercial version of Wibree is expected to be available in the second quarter of 2007. Nokia will likely offer the technology as a standalone chip and a combo chip with BlueTooth.
I'm looking forward to learning more about Wibree. BlueTooth certainly leaves a lot to be desired. But what does this mean for other personal area networking technologies like Zigbee?
P.S. On October 17 at 2pm EST I'm going to be hosting a webinar titled, Web in Motion: Competitive Advantage through Mobile Web Applications with Sybase iAnywhere's Director of Engineering. Register now so you can learn how to improve your mobile enterprise applications. - Eli