Toshiba Gets Approval for Bluetooth 1.2 SDIO Card

The Bluetooth Qualification Program has given its approval to a new Toshiba Bluetooth 1.2 SDIO card. There are already several Bluetooth SDIO cards on the market from Toshiba, but this is the first one to use the latest version of the Bluetooth Core Specification.

Bluetooth 1.2 introduces Adaptive Frequency Hopping (AFH), which was designed to reduce interference between wireless technologies sharing the 2.4 GHz spectrum. Cordless telephones, microwave ovens, and certain Wireless Local Area Networking (WLAN) technologies, including IEEE 802.11b and IEEE 802.11g, generally share the same wireless frequencies as Bluetooth. AFH works within the spectrum to take advantage of the available frequencies without limiting the Bluetooth transmission to a set of frequencies occupied by other technologies. This 'adaptive hopping' allows for more efficient transmission within the spectrum, thereby providing the user with greater performance, even if using other technologies along with the Bluetooth wireless technology.

In addition, this version of the wireless technology allows for even faster connections to other Bluetooth wireless devices, thus improving the user experience.

Bluetooth 1.2 also offers Enhanced Voice Processing, designed to improve the quality of voice connections, particularly in noisy environments, using error detection methodologies.

As a core feature, the new version of the Bluetooth Core Specification is backward compatible with Bluetooth 1.1 products, allowing users of nearly all existing Bluetooth equipped devices to easily work with products built to the new Specification.

It is not known at this time when Toshiba will release this Bluetooth card or what it will sell for. Toshiba has not yet received FCC approval for this device, a necessity before it can go on sale in the U.S.

What is the Bluetooth Qualification Program?

In order for a product to carry the Bluetooth seal, it must go through an approval process. When this has been successfully completed, the product is listed on the Bluetooth Qualification Program web site. This is somewhat similar to the process wireless devices of all kinds have to go through to get FCC approval.

However, when an FCC approved device is posted on that government agency's web site, it is accompanied by documents that give a great deal of information about it. This is not true of the Bluetooth Qualification Program web site, where a bare mention of the device is all that is given.

More information is available on the Bluetooth Qualification Program web site.