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The recent focus has been on combining Bluetooth with Wi-Fi for faster performance, but a new low energy variant of the short range standard could be the fastest shipping wireless technology in history, some analysts predict. On the day that the Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG) releases its high data rate upgrade, a developers' meeting in Tokyo is pushing forward the new low energy offering, with first handsets likely to appear next year.

UK-based chipmaker CSR said it planned to offer a single-mode chip for low energy Bluetooth, while Texas Instruments committed to both single-mode and dual-mode products and Nordic Semiconductor announced its nRF8000 family. Along with previous announcements from Broadcom and EM Microelectronics, that makes seven low energy Bluetooth chipsets on the market, says EETimes.

Product designers will get development kits in the next few months, and so real world handsets could appear next year, with TI pricing its entry level developer offering at just $99 for a single-mode slave and USB adapter. Bluetooth low energy started life as the Wibree platform, created initially by Nokia as a separate initiative but then adopted by the Bluetooth SIG. As well as handsets, it should go into many kinds of appliances and home or industrial low power gadgets. Fiona Thomson of IMS Research told the meeting that this could be the fastest shipping wireless technology ever, predicting that 70% of Bluetooth phones will be using the low energy variant by 2013.

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