Is it just me, or did the 5 use cases proposed in the article immediately give you the reaction "Yuck, I'm kind of glad that none of those things actually broadcast that crap (yet)."
Bluetooth 4.0 LE - Non-paired communication in the 10s of meters range. Very low power. 250kbps or so max speed.<p>It could be useful for easily interacting with devices, e.g. thermostats, exercise monitors, televisions, cars…<p>There don't appear to be (m)any devices using it now. But it is in the phone, waiting.
Talking about iPhone and Bluetooth: is there any app that would make it easier to switch BT on and off? BT and WiFi are major power drains, so I always switch them off as soon as I can, but it's a major pain.<p>By default you have to go to Settings -> General -> Bluetooth -> on/off -- 4 taps, which is ridiculous. It's slightly better for WiFi, "only" 3 taps.<p>Ideally I'd be able to get buttons on my home screen that will quickly switch these on or off with 1 tap.
I highly doubt that Bluetooth 4.0 is going to remove the biggest obstacle to these sorts of applications on the iPhone, which is Apple's review process.<p>Right now if your Bluetooth device corresponds to one of the handful of profiles with blanket approval from Apple (headsets, keyboards, certain accessibility hardware) you're fine, but if you're trying to do anything as exotic as serial communication with a third-party device you're shit out of luck unless you join Apple's MFI program.<p>And the MFI program won't even talk to you until you've lawyered up, so it's pretty alienating to anyone who wants to build something as a side project.<p>The same goes for serial communication. You can buy a nicely-built RedPark cable and make a stunningly beautiful app to talk to whatever device is on the other end, but your app won't make it into the store unless Apple has put the MFI stamp of approval on your device.<p>Since Apple controls what goes into their App Store, it would require a major shift in their approval policy before we see any significant expansion of apps that talk to arbitrary Bluetooth-enabled widgets.<p>(If anyone has heard of examples of approved apps using serial or bluetooth communication to talk to unapproved devices, I'd love to know!)
<i>Some things that are not possible yet (though it would be super cool if they were on Apple’s todo list):<p>- iPhone to iPhone CoreBluetooth communication</i><p>This is a killer. All of the ideas suggested in the article would require custom built hardware- if we could do user-user connections then I think a lot more would be possible.
looks like GAE quota was reached. fixing now.<p>article is also mirrored on tumblr @<p><a href="http://dedegroup.tumblr.com/post/14177518904/bluetooth" rel="nofollow">http://dedegroup.tumblr.com/post/14177518904/bluetooth</a>
The only problem with all of these use cases is very few people walk around with their bluetooth on all the time! Cool technology but I don't see this getting picked up in the way you're imagining.
Anything wireless that doesn't require some sort of pairing is crap.<p>Maybe fine for tv remote if you still want to be vulnerable to tv-be-gone. But since even tvs now have powerful cpus, not even it is worth