Nokia's Wibree becomes Bluetooth specs...

The Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG),  the more than 8,000-company strong trade association responsible for advancing Bluetooth wireless technology, joined Nokia today in announcing that the Wibree forum, the group specifying the Nokia developed ultra low power wireless technology, will be merged with the Bluetooth SIG.

This decision was took in part because Wibee offer a more efficient alternative, Nokia says: "Wibree has the same fundamentals but uses only a small fraction of the energy, making it viable for watches and other devices where Bluetooth 1.0 or 2.0 would use too much power."

The announcement should increase the exposure of Wibree, which has been established as an open standard but was expected primarily to reach Nokia devices. The company, however, notes that the adoption of the now unnamed low-power Bluetooth protocol will push back its completion from the second half of 2007 to the first half of 2008. 

Devices using the format should be available later in 2008 once manufacturers have had time to implement the technology in finished hardware.

Technical details:

Wibree technology complements close range communication with Bluetooth like performance within 0-10 m range and data rate of 1 Mbps. Wibree is optimized for applications requiring extremely low power consumption, small size and low cost. Wibree is implemented either as stand-alone chip or as Bluetooth-Wibree dual-mode chip. The small devices like watches and sports sensors will be based on stand-alone chip whereas Bluetooth devices will take benefit of the dual-mode solution, extending Bluetooth device connectivity to new range of smallest devices.


Source: NOKIA press release