Bluetooth 6.0 has been announced, with a few interesting improvements baked in.
One unlocks distance-sensing, which could make device-finding even easier.
We might only now be getting a proper wave of devices with Bluetooth 5.4 built into them, but Bluetooth keeps moving forward – the 6.0 version of the wireless standard has just been announced.
It features a range of improvements and new features, but probably the most attention-grabbing is that it'll enable devices to detect the distance between them and connected hardware. That means, for example, your phone will know how far you are from it while you're using wireless earbuds.
This could be useful in myriad ways, but one huge factor is how it'll play into device-finding software. Take Apple's Find My system, for example – which uses Bluetooth to detect one of the company's best iPhones and other Apple hardware that passes near your own. If each of those devices were suddenly able to know how far they were from yours, the software might have a much easier time locating it precisely, rather than just in a broad area.
This is all contained within a feature called Bluetooth Channel Sounding, and the Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG) has also claimed that this feature will unlock new authentication security for various devices like smart locks to make them more secure.
There are a few other features mentioned in the post announcing Bluetooth 6.0, including various complex systems geared around advertising, but distance detection seems like the most impactful part of the upgrade. When it might start to be implemented in actual hardware is anyone's guess, though.
We'd assume it won't be present in the iPhone 16, for example, which will be unveiled early next week, despite how closely Apple has tended to work with the Bluetooth SIG.
It's not impossible that it'll take more like a year for the features to really start to get into the wild, based on the speed of adoption that Bluetooth 5.4 has demonstrated so far.
Still, it's good to hear that the technology continues to advance at pace, and to know that Find My features will be getting even more powerful and reliable at some point down the line.
