This year on-wards, we’ll be seeing a new trend in the bluetooth technology on our devices. Smartphone flagships will be spotting bluetooth 5.0 in the specifications. One of the first major phones to actually to have bluetooth 5.0 is the Samsung Galaxy S8, which was released in April 2017.

So what is bluetooth 5 ? And how is it different from bluetooth 4.0 or bluetooth 4.2 spotted in the iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 plus?  What’s the big deal?

Bluetooth 5.0 Explained!

Bluetooth 5 is the new bluetooth standard that was launched in December 2016 to make the whole bluetooth experience better.

You’ll admit that the bluetooth technology has been stagnant for a long time and other wireless communication modes like Wi-fi were taking up the roles bluetooth used to play on our devices. All previous versions of bluetooth had small minor tweaks and improvements; no major improvements.

But bluetooth 5 is almost an overhaul of the main features. It’s a bold attempt to make the technology faster, more flexible, stronger and able to regain it’s dominance as a device communication technology.  Here are the main improvements you will get with Bluetooth 5.0

Features of Bluetooth 5.0

Speed: Bluetooth 5.0 is 2x faster than the all previous versions. It pairs bluetooth devices faster and the transmission is twice as fast. This eliminates the delay sometimes experienced when using bluetooth headphones to watch a movie or video.

Range: Another major weakness of bluetooth for a long time, has been it’s short range of connectivity.  As soon as you move to the next room or move some 50M away in a direct line of sight, the devices start to disconnect.

With bluetooth 5.0 you can move upto to 200M away in direct line of sight and maintain strong and fast connectivity. Through walls and other barriers, you’ll get seamless connection up to 40 meters apart. That’s a huge improvement.

Data Throughput: Bluetooth 5.0 transmits 8 times the amount of data that could be transmitted by previous versions of bluetooth at the same time. If it took 5 minutes to transfer 30MB of data,  you can transfer 250MB of data in the same time with bluetooth 5.0

Wireless Coexistence: All the improvements above have allowed a completely brand new bluetooth feature we call wireless co-existsence.  This feature allows you to connect your smartphone to more than one bluetooth device at the same time. On Samsung Galaxy S8, it’s called Duo Audio and it lets you connect to two bluetooth speakers at the same time.

With these features, you can already see that bluetooth 5.0 series is going to be the real deal. The bluetooth technology that might be on a phone you buy this year and in the coming days. That’s what to expect.