Nokia introduces Wibree, a low-power alternative to Bluetooth: No, no, no, no. We don't need another wireless standard with a silly name. Wibree supposedly uses one-tenth the power of Bluetooth to deliver 1 Mbps (1/3 of Bluetooth's current radio speed) over 10 meters. With Zigbee (extremely low bandwidth, extremely low power, short distances), ultrawideband (high bandwidth, low power, short distances), Bluetooth (low-to-medium bandwidth, low power, short distances), and Wi-Fi (medium bandwidth, medium power, medium distances), it's really hard to see how Wibree fits into this ecosystem.
Bluetooth has a billion embedded chips now, and is still growing, despite reports of its death every few weeks since before its actual first shipment. Bluetooth is morphing from an application plus radio standard into an application standard that can be overlaid with minimal effort onto many radio standards. In that sense, perhaps Bluetooth would be a layer over Wibree, which would be just radio technology.
Still, Nokia should have a hard time of it introducing yet-another-technology that appears to have a single unique attribute--lower power than Bluetooth. They will try to get it introduced into a standards process.
"One tenth the power" provides benefits:
Longer clock-time between recharges, smaller batteries, and longer battery life (in calendar-days).
I have had no training in battery engineering, but I believe that a battery deteriorates with each discharge-recharge cycle. One-tenth power drain means an application which required 365 recharges per year will require only 36.
Do you know if the Wibree specification is available online anywhere? The search engines come up blank.
Works for me too...
...provided that the time to aquire is similar to Bluetooth.
My app. requires low power and quick acqisition, Bluetooth is currently the best compromise. If I use Zigbee in order to take advantage of its very low power the radio is on so rarely that the user has to wait far too long to do anything.