Bluetooth 3.0 Technology Speed test

The Bluetooth 3.0 specifications detail three things Unicast connection-less data, Enhanced Power Control and Alternate MAC/PHY. The Unicast part specifies a way to send a little data without much delay and the Enhanced Power Control keeps a tighter reign on the transmitting power and makes the device a little more power-efficient.

But its the Alternate MAC/PHY section of the specifications thats interesting and also the section thats not mandatory to get a Bluetooth 3.0 certification. It allows two BT3.0-certified devices to do a handshake over a Bluetooth link and then switch to a 802.11 link to achieve speeds of up to 24Mbps.

Devices that support Alternate MAC/PHY are certified as "Bluetooth 3.0+HS" (High Speed) and ones that do not are certified as just Bluetooth 3.0 and are limited to regular Bluetooth transfer speeds.

A bit more digging reveals that Android 2.2 does not even support Bluetooth 3.0 the BlueZ library that it uses is old and works only up to Bluetooth 2.1+EDR. You can check Bluetooth support info for the other Android versions over at their dev site.

Its possible that manufacturers use a different software stack, but the transfer between the two Bluetooth 3.0 certified Samsung droids we tested was going at v2.1 speeds, so that was not it.

The Bluetooth SIG website settled any remaining doubts we had. None of the phones we checked were Bluetooth 3.0+HS certified, they support just the vanilla v3.0. This put an end to this speed test 24Mbps just was not going to happen so when you come to pick your next uber-smartphone you can safely ignore the Bluetooth 3.0 specs as long as they do not list HS explicitly.