I have a friend who a while back decided to join the BlueTooth concortium just for the heck of it. He handed me about 40 pages of printed material that he already read the next day... I haven't asked him about this, so below is just my assumption...


1st - Like jinxy, I haven't heard of BlueTooth devices going beyond 10meters, since it is designed to be low power and of about 300kbit datarate.

2nd - If they did make something like that, I would *assume* that it would be backwards compatible. Keep in mind I haven't read anything talking about that Class 1 of 330ft? Perhaps you are talking about WiFi, which has that range, but BT and WiFi are incompatible. Infact, they probably intefere with each other. Same thing with Microwaves and 2.4Ghz phones, but soon newer Microwaves will have some magnets placed throughout the Magnetron to clean up the emited Microwaves to hopefully not intefere with these technologies...


For a while it seemed that BT could have been the next big thing, but the papers I browsed over seemed to say that BT wasn't designed to take over WiFi. Instead, it was designed for a PAN, or Personal Area Network. That 10meter "Bubble" would be just enough for all of your gadgets to communicate with each other, and your friend's gadgets if needed. Since it was for all of your tiny tech gizmos, they decided that power consumption was a priority, they decided that BT would have limited range (10m) and low datarates (300kbit/s?). The paper went on talking about how much power other Wireless technologies such as WiFi use more power with more range (100m) and high datarate (11mbit/s), and how Telestrial Satelite systems for those Satelite Phones and stuff used a lot of power, but to *reduce* it used low datarates (64kbit?) for that distance (distance to a telestrial satelite?). If they wanted to, they could increase power consumption and datarate, but it was my understanding that BlueTooth was for your "Personal Network", and thus would never go 100meters since power requirements would go up too much.

In the US, BT didn't catch on. Same in Japan I think, but it was marketed differently. In early 2001 or so, BlueTooth phones were apparently marketed as being able to play Movies over your wireless network, but I think those phones were eventually discontinued, as my ancient 2000-2001 era phone that plays ATRAC-3 (Sony's Propietary Format, like MiniDisc) was soon discontinued. In Europe though, I think BlueTooth is doing a bit better, and Sony decided to allow the NX-73V Clié to have built-in BlueTooth, and to only market the really expensive BlueTooth Memory Stick over there...


I'll ask my friend if he heard anything about 100meters for BT. I really doubt it though...