For the first time in eight years, a new full Bluetooth version has been launched.
Bluetooth 6.0 is here, but are the new features things you'll actually be excited about?
That might depend on you. Let's get right into it with a cool feature
called channel sounding. Because Bluetooth is very commonly used
to locate misplaced devices, channel sounding was implemented
to make this process more accurate by using two new techniques to locate devices.
The first, called round trip time, notes the exact time a signal leaves one device,
the time it arrives at the second device, and how long it takes to come back to the first device
to help calculate the distance between them. The second technique is called PBR,
and no, I'm not talking about the greatest beer to ever grace this fine land.
PBR stands for phase based ranging, which measures the difference in the phase of the wave
that travels between the two devices. Bluetooth 6.0 can leverage both techniques at the same time
to judge distances more accurately than the previous method,
which mostly relied on measuring signal strength and angles.
Channel sounding is supposed to allow you to pinpoint a device's location
down to a few centimeters under optimal conditions,
similar to the ultra wide band tech that Apple uses in its air tags.
But since Bluetooth is a widely used open standard,
the hope is that Bluetooth 6.0 will make precise location measurement more accessible
if you're not in the Apple ecosystem. Channel sounding's better distance sensitivity
also has implications for physical security,
as it can be used to ensure that things like Bluetooth operated smart locks
can only be operated by someone who's both authorized and in close proximity to the lock,
and not by some sneaky boy in a different room.
But if you're the type of person that just never loses anything,
there are other Bluetooth 6.0 features you might care about. There are a pair of features in Bluetooth 6.0
that refer to advertising, but fortunately they have nothing to do with ads
for things like this lovely shirt from LTT Store I'm wearing.
Thank goodness. Instead, these features are actually meant to help your Bluetooth devices suck down less battery.
What the, advertising battery? I'll explain.
The first feature is called decision based advertising filtering,
and it works with Bluetooth low energy, which is used by a huge number of devices
and utilizes multiple channels, basically radio frequencies to transmit data.
These channels are split into primary and secondary
with the primary channels mainly being used for advertising,
that is telling other nearby devices that a certain Bluetooth device is present.
It's how your phone detects your earbuds or how your laptop detects your Bluetooth mouse.
With this new feature, a device can listen to the data being sent to it
on a primary advertising channel and use that data to decide if the remaining data
on the secondary channels is relevant to what the application is doing.
This means that your device won't waste battery on scanning for and processing extraneous transmissions.
For example, imagine a music app trying to listen for music signals.
If it hears an advertising packet from a fitness tracker on the primary channel,
it knows it can ignore the data on the secondary channel
so it doesn't waste energy processing your new personal best clean and jerk.
That's a fitness thing, Glenn. The other advertising feature
is called monitoring advertisers, and it's a bit more straightforward.
Bluetooth devices often cannot know if a saved device they want to connect to
is within a close enough range. This means that a device can waste a lot of energy
searching for the gadget it's trying to connect to, even if it's well out of range,
like if you leave your Bluetooth speaker at home. This is where monitoring advertisers comes in.
The device instead tracks when a device moves out of range,
so the host device will stop trying to connect to it.
Once the device moves back into range, like when you get home, the host will know that too,
so it can automatically reconnect. And speaking of speakers, LOL,
there are also minor changes to exactly how data packets are delivered
that should decrease audio latency, meaning an improvement in how well
the sound coming out of your headphones matches what's happening on the screen.
Not going to say no to that. Of course, we should note that Bluetooth 6.0
is just a specification for now, and it's up to manufacturers
to start including it in their products. While we do expect this will happen,
there have actually been cases in the past where a technology failed,
partly because no one made anything for it,
which is exactly what happened to wireless USB. So if you want to learn more about why that failed,
go watch this video next. It's fascinating.