Bluetooth 10th Birthday in 2008

Bluetooth celebrates its 10th birthday in 2008. Bluetooth is a wireless “personal area networking” technology that enables electronic devices to communicate with each other wirelessly. Bluetooth uses relatively little power and costs fairly little to implement, though it’s considerably slower than Wi-Fi wireless networking, making it best suited to applications where there’s a fairly limited amount of data going back and forth.

Apple has been building in Bluetooth support to its Macs for years to enable them to work with Bluetooth-equipped wireless keyboards and mice, synchronize data with cell phones and PDAs, print to Bluetooth-enabled printers and communicate with other devices.

Since its introduction in 1998, more than 1.5 billion Bluetooth-enabled products have shipped. The Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG) announced Monday that Bluetooth technology celebrates its 10th anniversary in 2008. The technology first got off the ground in 1998, though products didn’t follow for two years. Since its commercial introduction in 2000, more than 1.5 billion Bluetooth-enabled products have shipped, according to the organization.