BLUETOOTH 4.0 Bluetooth is that wireless technology that connects gadgets within 30 feet — your phone to your headset, for example — and kills your battery charge.
It is designed to connect gadgets that would otherwise have to be hooked up with wires: cellphone to earpiece, mouse to PC, palmtop to printer and so on.
Simon Segars, the chief executive of ARM, a British company whose technology underlies the chips in almost every smartphone, thinks that the phone is becoming a "hub" from which other connected gadgets will be controlled.
Bunz said the economic demands of bringing small connected gadgets to market meant security, an added expense, was often overlooked, providing hackers with an increasing wealth of potentially exploitable devices.
That seemed to ring a bell with the audience.All this will make technology even more complex, because broadband needs to work reliably both at great distances (to connect to the internet and when roaming) and at short distances (to connect gadgets within the home).
At CES 2014, Withings was showing off the latest product in its lineup of home health tracking connected gadgets, the Aura.
NEEO is a dedicated device that includes a remote, as well as a brain to centralize control of your home, including your home theater equipment as well as connected gadgets like the Nest, Philips Hue and more.
Mostly, I'd be interested to see how it impacts smartphone usage, and what it does in terms of cutting back on our time spent interfacing directly with our connected gadgets.
It's possible that its interests lie primarily with building more of the same, including Touch ID sensors for a wider range of smartphones and for its tablets, but it's seeming more and more likely that the next new connected gadgets it releases will employ sapphire to protect their screens, instead of the highly scratch resistant engineered glass they use now.
Add to that, managing connected gadgets via an app can come across as more of a time-sink not less, given you're asking users to spend time interfacing with/wrangling software to set-up and manage various profiles and device controls, instead of just flicking switches and pushing physical buttons at the point of use.
