In the late 900's, King Harald Bluetooth Gormson united Denmark and Norway in Christianity and ruled both countries as king until deposed by his son. When short-range wireless communication was developed by Ericsson in 1994 with the ability to connect many different uses through one technology, the name blue tooth was selected because of the unifying ability of both the late king and the technology.

One of the first uses of blue tooth was to connect a cell phone to a headset without wires, enabling the headset use or with a cell phone car kit. This made using the device much more popular with the wires eliminated. Other popular and most often utilized devices with blue tooth is wireless mouse, keyboard and printer as well as devices to help share data at short distances without the need for wired hookups.

Wireless communications of game stations such as Sony's Playstation 3 and Nintendo's Wii utilize blue tooth technology for their controllers to work wirelessly. Blue tooth also helped replace wired serial communications for test devices and medical equipment as well as in GPS equipment. It has also reduced the number of devices utilizing infrared for connectivity.

Blue Tooth Battle With Wi-Fi

Blue tooth and Wi-Fi share many of the same abilities, including the frequency on which they operate. The biggest difference is Wi-Fi operates with significantly more power, which dramatically increases its range of use. With blue tooth, the range is significantly shorter. Additionally, blue tooth readily sands out a signal telling the electronic world what it is capable of doing and can readily connect to many devices. With Wi-Fi, a working relationship must first be established between the different units.

Wi-Fi is more suited to larger wireless networks due to its higher power and longer ranges as well as the security implementations that can be included in connections. Whereas blue tooth is quicker at locating new connections and becoming connected. A master blue tooth device can connect to up to seven devices at one time. Additionally another 255 devices can be placed in a standby mode, which the master can activate at any time by inactivating one of the previously active devices.

When a blue tooth enabled device is looking for a connection it will transmit certain information in seeking a pairing. The device name and class and a list of services being offered as well as technical information is sent out in hopes of finding a match for its offerings.