Look around you at the moment, you have your keyboard connected to the computer, as well as a printer, mouse, monitor and so on. What (literally) joins all of these together?, they are connected by cables. Cables have become the bane of many offices, homes etc. Most of us have experienced the 'joys' of trying to figure out what cable goes where, and getting tangled up in the details. Bluetooth essentially aims to fix this, it is a cable-replacement technology
Conceived initially by Ericsson, before being adopted by a myriad of other companies, Bluetooth is a standard for a small , cheap radio chip to be plugged into computers, printers, mobile phones, etc.A Bluetooth chip is designed to replace cables by taking the information normally carried by the cable, and transmitting it at a special frequency to a receiver Bluetooth chip, which will then give the information received to the mouse, keyboard, computer, headset, cell phone whatever.
The Problem
When any two devices need to talk to each other, they have to agree on a couple of points before the conversation can begin. The first point of agreement is physical: Will they talk over wires, or through some form of wireless signals? If they use wires, how many are required -- one, two, eight, 25? Once the physical attributes are decided, several more questions arise:
* How much data will be sent at a time? For instance, serial ports send data 1 bit at a time, while parallel ports send several bits at once.
* How will they speak to each other? All of the parties in an electronic discussion need to know what the bits mean and whether the message they receive is the same message that was sent. This means developing a set of commands and responses known as a protocol.
Bluetooth is essentially a networking standard that works at two levels:
* It provides agreement at the physical level -- Bluetooth is a radio-frequency standard.
* It provides agreement at the protocol level, where products have to agree on when bits are sent, how many will be sent at a time, and how the parties in a conversation can be sure that the message received is the same as the message sent.
Now, as far as power and charging issues...
The Bluetooth Solution
Bluetooth takes small-area networking to the next level by removing the need for user intervention and keeping transmission power extremely low to save battery power. Each transmission signal to and from your cell phone consumes just 1 milliwatt of power, so your cell phone charge is virtually unaffected by Bluetooth activity.
By the way if, you're wondering where the Bluetooth name originally came from, it named after a Danish Viking and King, Harald Blåtand (translated as Bluetooth in English), who lived in the latter part of the 10th century. He managed to unite Denmark and part of Norway into a single kingdom then introduced Christianity into Denmark. He was killed in 986 during a battle with his son, Svend Forkbeard. Choosing this name for the standard indicates how important companies from the Nordic region (nations including Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Finland) are to the communications industry, even if it says little about the way the technology works.
I hope this helps!
-dontyouwishyouknewme