Everything is ready for Bluetooth 5.1: what’s new? What changes? Here’s everything you need to know about Bluetooth 5.1
Table of Contents
Bluetooth 5.1
Bluetooth 5.1 is official: huge progress on localization accuracy.
In fact, today, the non-profit organization Bluetooth SIG (Special Interest Group), which since 1998 oversees the development of the standard, has announced the birth of Bluetooth 5.1.
The technology is NOT yet available for end users, but it is already in the hands of developers to start working on the new short-range communication tool right away.
What changes with the Bluetooth 5.1?
As the number says (going from 5.0 to 5.1), the new standard is not a distortion of the current one, but represents an incremental novelty, however, well accepted.
The main novelty of Bluetooth 5.1 concerns the detection of the position, which not only can now reach the accuracy of one centimeter, but with the new standard will give the possibility to determine the direction in which the object is located.
What good is this precision of Bluetooth 5.1?
A similar precision can make the difference in many areas: from the private one in which every day we use the various trackers to “hook” to objects that we do not want to lose, to the industrial one, where it would be possible to immediately locate an object among all those crammed into a warehouse.
Or, as Bluetooth SIG executive director Mark Powell explains, “we could soon see an evolution of indoor navigation, with people who can easily navigate in supermarkets, airports, museums and even in cities.”
In short, the greater accuracy of Bluetooth 5.1 will not change your life, but it will surely make it even simpler and smarter.
There are other improvements, among these it is worth mentioning a renewed caching system for the GATT (Generic Attribute Profile) profile: it should guarantee faster and less expensive server/client connections in terms of energy.
When will the first 5.1 Bluetooth devices arrive?
It’s too early to say, but maybe by the end of 2019 we could see the first smartphones that can support this new technology.
Theoretically, it could arrive on all the current ones with Bluetooth 5 through the software update, but the times are usually quite long.
We’ll see.