Bluetooth 5.0: Explained

So the Galaxy S8 is a head-turning phone and there are plenty of awesome new things about it but one thing that kind of went under the radar. I don't even know if it was officially said during the announcement is that this is the first phone
in the world to ship with Bluetooth 5.0. So you've probably heard of Bluetooth and you may even know if your phone has bluetooth 4.0 or 4.1 or 4.2 but generally those different iterations of Bluetooth are just slight improvements to things like pairing time and low energy modes etc. It doesn't really change the way you use it. you just know your phone has bluetooth. But 5.0, that's a pretty big new number that seems to signify sort of a bigger change. So there's a couple things that you should know. So what is new with Bluetooth 5.0??

There are three main things that all enable one pretty dope new features.

1) 2X Faster

It's 2 times faster. Bluetooth pairing is generally not that quick of a process. You have to do it very often but it's pretty slow. You're someone like me who's connecting a lot of Bluetooth speakers as I test a bunch of them for a video then you know that it's not super quick but doing it with this Galaxy S8 with Bluetooth 5.0 shows a direct advantage of data transferring twice as fast which is the pairing process is a bit quicker and there's also less delay. You ever watch a video like on Bluetooth speakers or Bluetooth headphones and like the audio is a little bit behind the video like someone's talking and then you hear it like a split second behind. Usually not too bad but that actually does get solved a bit with Bluetooth 5.0. That delay is a lot smaller so that's data speed.

 2) 4X Range

It has four times the range that's actually been a real-world weakness of Bluetooth. It depends on what pair of headphones you use but sometimes you can be listening to music in your headphones and you leave your phone in another room. You walk a little bit too far away and it starts cutting out and then eventually stops. That happens like all the time. The theoretical maximum range of Bluetooth 4 was about 50 meters with a direct line of sight but about 10 meters in everyday use through walls and around corners and around different rooms of the house. So that means, you can't get very far away from your phone. If you're trying to listen to music or if you walk around the corner, it's going to cut out and that's kind of a none. Bluetooh 5.0 quadruples that max range. So a theoretical maximum of 200 meters with a direct line of sight or about 40 meters around a house or indoors. So that's 120 feet. That's a legitimate serious improvement. So that's not just like downstairs and around the corner, that's like you can walk out in your backyard while your phone's upstairs, you can walk to the front yard or around the gym. What have you got to do, you can get a lot further from your audio source with Bluetooth 5.0.

3) 8X Data

The third improvement is eight times the data through put of Bluetooth 4 and this is where a lot of the real world improvements and dope features start to get enabled. So first of all, this has benefits way beyond just like audio because usually that's what we use Bluetooth for. But Bluetooth can also be used for things like Bluetooth beacons and parking meters and small wireless things. Those can also be helped by more data throughput through Bluetooth five but if you think about a Bluetooth stream like a highway, it used to be a two-lane highway going 40 miles an hour for 20 miles. Now it's a 16 lane wide mega highway going 80 miles an hour for 80 miles. It's a completely different story. So having all these lanes of data moving so fast enables a pretty sweet feature which Samsung calls and which we call, since they're kind of first to it, dual audio which lets you output to two different Bluetooth speakers at the same time. So the fact is that works so easily is awesome. You might notice there's this super tiny delay in the the audio timing but that can be negotiated just by moving them further apart.