60 Fun Facts About Bluetooth

Bluetooth is named after a 10th-century king of which country?

Harald Bluetooth united the Danish tribes into one kingdom, and the name was meant to suggest uniting communication protocols.

The Bluetooth logo is a bind rune combining which two Younger Futhark runes?

It merges the Younger Futhark runes Hagall and Bjarkan, standing for H and B.

Bluetooth radios operate in which frequency band?

It shares the globally unlicensed ISM band with microwave ovens and much Wi-Fi traffic.

In its most widely used mode, Bluetooth's range is roughly how far?

Transmission power in that mode is limited to just 2.5 milliwatts.

Which Swedish company began developing the short-link radio technology that became Bluetooth in 1989?

Nils Rydbeck, CTO at Ericsson Mobile in Lund, initiated it to develop wireless headsets.

Which Dutch engineer, who led a group of engineers in Lund, is credited as the inventor of Bluetooth?

He was inducted into the US National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2015.

Who proposed the name Bluetooth in 1997, and for which company did he work?

He got the idea from a conversation about Viking history and a picture of Harald's runestone.

Bluetooth was only a placeholder codename. Which two names were candidates to replace it at launch?

PAN was the front runner until a search found tens of thousands of hits online, and RadioWire's trademark search could not be finished in time.

Which historical novel about Vikings sparked the conversation that led to the Bluetooth name?

Frans G. Bengtsson's novel was recounted to Jim Kardach by the engineer Sven Mattisson.

Which five companies were the original members of the Bluetooth SIG when it launched in May 1998?

IBM and the Swedish firm were the founding signatories after a plan to build a phone into a ThinkPad proved too power-hungry.

Where is the Bluetooth Special Interest Group headquartered?

The SIG is a not-for-profit corporation that publishes the specifications and protects the trademarks but makes no products itself.

Roughly how many member companies does the Bluetooth SIG have?

A manufacturer must meet SIG standards to market a product as a Bluetooth device.

Under which IEEE standard number was Bluetooth once standardized?

The IEEE no longer maintains the standard; the SIG does.

What kind of product was the first Bluetooth device revealed in 1999?

It won the Best of Show Technology Award at COMDEX.

Which phone from the Swedish firm behind Bluetooth was the first commercially available Bluetooth handset in 2001?

The T36 was an unreleased prototype; the revised T39 reached shelves in June 2001, after the R520m.

Which laptop, launched in October 2001, was the first notebook with integrated Bluetooth?

IBM had contributed patents around the logical layer to the standard.

Which radio technique lets Bluetooth resist interference by switching frequencies many times a second?

Adaptive frequency hopping later let it avoid crowded frequencies in the sequence.

How many designated 1 MHz channels does classic Bluetooth hop between?

Bluetooth Low Energy instead uses 40 channels with 2 MHz spacing.

How many hops per second does a classic Bluetooth link usually make?

Each hop lands on one of the band's 1 MHz-wide channels.

One master device can communicate with at most how many slave devices at once?

Two or more piconets can link into a scatternet, with some devices playing master in one and slave in another.

What is the name for an ad hoc network of Bluetooth devices sharing one master's clock?

The master transmits in even time slots and receives in odd ones.

What is the maximum power output of a Class 1 Bluetooth radio?

Class 2, the type in most battery-powered devices, tops out at 2.5 mW.

An August 2004 experiment extended the range of a Class 2 Bluetooth radio to a record of about how far?

It used directional antennas and signal amplifiers, a practice known as Bluetooth sniping.

What is the shared secret created when two Bluetooth devices pair called?

Devices that both store the same one are said to be paired or bonded, and can reconnect without pairing again.

Headsets with almost no inputs traditionally used which fixed PIN codes for legacy pairing?

Any 16-byte UTF-8 string could technically be a PIN, but such devices hard-code a simple one.

Which Bluetooth release introduced Secure Simple Pairing as its headline feature?

It was adopted by the SIG on 26 July 2007 and uses a form of public-key cryptography.

Which Secure Simple Pairing method shows a 6-digit code on both devices for the user to compare?

It protects against man-in-the-middle attacks, provided the user actually compares the numbers.

Which pairing method requires no user interaction and offers no man-in-the-middle protection?

It is typical for headsets with minimal input and output capabilities.

What did the EDR in Bluetooth 2.0 + EDR stand for?

It raised the raw data rate to 3 Mbit/s using phase-shift keying modulation.

Bluetooth 3.0 + HS reached 24 Mbit/s by handing bulk data to which other radio technology?

The Bluetooth link only negotiated and set up the connection; the high-speed part was optional and marked with a +HS logo.

Bluetooth Low Energy started life in 2006 as a Nokia project with what brand name?

It was folded into Bluetooth 4.0 as Bluetooth Low Energy in December 2009.

Bluetooth 4.0, adopted in 2010, was marketed as Bluetooth what?

It bundled Classic Bluetooth, high speed and the new Low Energy protocol aimed at coin-cell devices.

Bluetooth 5, released in December 2016, dropped what from its name compared with earlier releases?

Marketing called it simply Bluetooth 5, and Sony's Xperia XZ Premium was the first phone announced with it.

For Low Energy links, Bluetooth 5 could double the data rate or multiply the range by how much?

The trade-off is that the longer range comes at the expense of data rate.

Which Bluetooth version, published on 31 December 2019, introduced LE Audio?

LE Audio uses the new LC3 codec and adds support for hearing aids.

What is the name of the LE Audio feature that lets one source broadcast to many receivers?

It also allows many-to-one transmission, and the SIG declared LE Audio complete on 12 July 2022.

Bluetooth Core Specification 6.0, released in August 2024, added which distance-measuring feature?

Bluetooth was also demonstrated in space for the first time in 2024.

Bluetooth Mesh, allowing many-to-many communication over Bluetooth Low Energy, was adopted in which year?

It was conceived in 2014 and defined in the Mesh Profile and Mesh Model specifications.

Which Bluetooth profile streams stereo music from a phone to wireless headphones?

It requires the low-complexity SBC codec and optionally supports others such as MPEG audio.

Which profile connects a phone to a digital thermometer or heart-rate detector?

Profiles define how devices communicate so parameters need not be re-sent every time a link is made.

Which earlier short-range standard, replaced by Bluetooth, needed a separate adapter for each device?

Bluetooth lets many devices talk to a computer over a single adapter.

Which two seventh-generation game consoles used Bluetooth for their controllers?

Consoles have used Bluetooth for peripherals since that generation.

Apple's AirPods were first announced alongside which iPhone model in September 2016?

Within two years they became Apple's most popular accessory.

Apple products have supported Bluetooth since which version of Mac OS X, released in 2002?

Windows XP added native support with Service Pack 2.

Sending unsolicited vCard messages to nearby phones over Bluetooth is known as what?

It was reportedly first done by a Malaysian IT consultant who used his phone to send an advert to a Nokia 7650 owner in a bank.

What is stealing calendars, contacts or messages via an unauthorized Bluetooth connection called?

Unlike the harmless prank that only pushes a message to a target, this attack extracts information from it.

What name did security firm Armis give the Bluetooth vulnerabilities it found across Windows, Linux, iOS and Android?

The exploits allowed attackers to connect without authentication and gain virtually full control of a device.

The first purported Bluetooth mobile-phone virus appeared in 2004 on which operating system?

It was a proof of concept by the virus-writing group 29A and required users to approve the install.

As of 2021, roughly how many Bluetooth chips were being shipped each year?

That volume is why a network of patents is licensed to individual qualifying devices.

The traditional explanation of King Harald's nickname is that he had what?

A 12th-century chronicle glosses the byname as bluish or black tooth, dens lividus vel niger.

Harald Bluetooth raised the larger of which famous pair of rune stones around 965 for his parents?

Its inscription credits him with unifying the kingdom and converting the Danes to Christianity.

Which Bluetooth version added adaptive frequency hopping to avoid crowded frequencies?

It improves resistance to interference from other users of the same band.

Which Ericsson Mobile CTO initiated the 'short-link' radio project in 1989?

Rydbeck tasked Wingren with specifying and Haartsen and Mattisson with developing; principal design began in 1994.

What was the original purpose of the short-link radio technology that became Bluetooth?

It grew from two inventions by Johan Ullman patented in Sweden in 1989 and 1992.

When the technology became an open standard, what did IBM contribute alongside Ericsson's radio?

Neither ThinkPads nor Ericsson phones led their markets, so both firms agreed an open standard would give each the widest access.

Which manufacturer was first to announce Bluetooth 5.0 support, with its Xperia XZ Premium in 2017?

The Samsung Galaxy S8 followed in April 2017 and Apple's iPhone 8 and X that September.

The Bluetooth protocol RFCOMM is a cable-replacement protocol that emulates what?

Because it mimics RS-232 signals, applications written for serial ports can be quickly ported to Bluetooth.

Which company originally developed BlueZ, the Bluetooth stack included in most Linux kernels?

Android's Fluoride stack, formerly Bluedroid, came from Broadcom instead.

The first Bluetooth device won a 'Best of Show' technology award at which 1999 trade show?

The first Bluetooth phone to reach shops was Ericsson's T39 in June 2001, after the unreleased T36 prototype.

The new features of Bluetooth 5, released in December 2016, focused mainly on what?

For low-energy links it offered a choice of double the data rate or four times the range.