7.2. Bluetooth Basics

Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG), a consortium of telecommunications, electronics, and computer manufacturers, develops Bluetooth. The founding members were Ericsson, Nokia, IBM, Intel, and Toshiba. The first version of the Bluetooth specification was formally adopted by the SIG in 1999.

The first revisions of the Bluetooth specification had a mixed reception, because implementations were dogged by interoperability problems. The 1.1 release, published in 2001, eliminated the gray areas from the 1.0b specification and, as a result, improved device interoperability. Over two years since the 1.1 release, Bluetooth is well on its way to becoming a ubiquitous technology in portable devices. At the time of writing, the current approved revision of the Bluetooth specification is Version 1.2, released in November 2003.