Bluetooth technology is moving beyond mobile phones and into your living room.
A standard feature enabling wireless hands-free communications in mobile phones, Bluetooth is now a household name for its convenience and user-friendliness.
Take a tour of what Bluetooth can do to enhance home entertainment:
- Bluetooth is a key component in wireless game console controllers.
- Bluetooth’s footprint is now expanding as top TV makers integrate it directly into televisions, 3D glasses, set-top boxes and Blu-Ray players.
- Bluetooth can enable a wide range of home entertainment peripherals to radically transform how we interact with them.
- Bluetooth turns the old-fashioned remote control into a multi-use device. The remote control itself can come as a traditional remote, add a QWERTY keyboard or voice recognition for search capability, or use gestures to select content for viewing or for playing games. With Bluetooth in the remote control, there is no longer a line-of-sight restriction; you can travel with the remote to another room and adjust volume or hit the pause button while grabbing a snack from the fridge.
- Bluetooth has evolved to deliver amazing battery life. Broadcom recently announced a Bluetooth chip for wireless keyboards that is capable of operating for up to 10 years on just 2 AA batteries.
A single Bluetooth chip in the TV can support multiple peripherals simultaneously (remote control, audio streaming, 3D glasses, etc.), sorting out all the signals to ensure a satisfying experience while navigating the increasingly complex features and services available via your TV. Try doing that with an old-fashioned infrared remote!
These same chips can be applied to the consumer electronics remote, another reason why Bluetooth is rapidly taking over control of your home electronics.
Broadcom is demonstrating its Bluetooth products for the home at the 2012 International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.
Prashant Mantha, Broadcom Blog Squad member, interviewed Steve McIntyre, Broadcom’s senior product line manager for the Mobile & Wireless Group, about how Broadcom chips enable a variety of Bluetooth-based remote devices and others, including gestures and voice-activated search, that don’t require a remote at all.
Learn more about Broadcom’s Bluetooth products and keep up with Broadcom at CES.
Prashant Mantha, Blog Squad Member
Prashant Mantha
Prashant is a student at University of California, San Diego, while also working as an intern for Broadcom’s Mobile and Wireless Group. He’s an experienced writer who started as the editor of his high school newspaper, then created a blog-styled database of challenging roads across the country for his last job at Automotive.com: http://www.bestroadsbyhonda.com/
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