Hello Wibree, and goodbye

Remember Wibree, the "little brother" to Bluetooth that Nokia announced last year? Nope, thought not - it's not even become commercially available yet. And it won't, because it's now been sort of subsumed into the Bluetooth standard itself.

It's now called Ultra Low Power (ULP) Bluetooth, which is pretty much exactly what it was anyway. Just to recap, Wibree/ULP Bluetooth was designed to let devices such as wireless keyboards and wearable technology talk to each other (well, not necessarily in the case of those two examples, but you get the point). The difference was that this technology was designed for non-constant bursts of communications, unlike the constant streaming for which Bluetooth proper is so useful, and was therefore supposed to be more power efficient.

Now Cambridge Silicon Radio has sampled the first ULP Bluetooth and Nokia has folded the Wibree Forum into the Bluetooth Special Interest Group, and Wibree as such is no more. Don't really know how much of a difference that really makes (aside from guaranteeing interoperability, which I suppose is quite useful), but it does help with one particular issue. In a week's time there's a Wireless Symposium on the topic: "Why do we need so many short-range wireless technologies?".

Well, one less to worry about now!