TechWorld, ‘The UK’s Infrastructure & Networking Knowledge Centre,’ recently published a series of articles on Bluetooth. I’ve put some links below to the articles for easy access.

The nuts and bolts of Bluetooth
Why Bluetooth version 2 matters
What do Bluetooth profiles do?
Bluetooth better than WLAN in mobile phones

Here’s an interesting quote from the WLAN article:

…a recent report from ARC Group, which says that shipments of Bluetooth smart phones will reach 87.5 million units - about 70 percent of the smart phone market - by 2009. This compares to WLAN smart phone shipments, which the group predicts will only reach 18.75 million units by the same year.

Some good reading. With the large number of Bluetooth devices shipping some interesting Bluetooth-enabled applications may finally be coming… but don’t hold your breath, because everything in the mobile world takes time.

I think a good metric for the true ‘arrival’ of Bluetooth will be things like: all iPods ship with Bluetooth, it becomes hard to purchase a desktop/laptop that doesn’t have Bluetooth (as it’s currently hard to purchase a motherboard without a built-in LAN chipset), aftermarket car stereos start shipping with Bluetooth, most automobiles ship with Bluetooth… oh, and of course, there’s some useful applications and peripherals that take advantage of Bluetooth.

P.S. Here’s a link to the Bluetooth specifications page, and here’s a link to PaloWireless’ page on Bluetooth protocol (it’s a bit more user friendly).