New Bluetooth Major May Help Your Smartphone Find Things Faster

The Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG), the standards organization behind the technology that lets you wirelessly connect a pair of headphones, quietly announced a specification update this week. When it arrives, Bluetooth 6 will improve streaming between devices and promise to help you find other Bluetooth devices nearby more quickly by introducing a feature called Channel Sounding. It’s the first significant update to the spec since Bluetooth 5 was introduced in 2016.

Channel Sounding adds “true proximity awareness” for Bluetooth devices to better track things like AirTags down to the centimeter. The feature promises to improve the overall user experience of tracking devices, making it “significantly easier and faster” to locate lost items connected via the “Find My” network. The capability seems to have been prioritized to fulfill what Bluetooth calls the “Find My” phenomenon, suggesting that it could be a feature that Apple is compatible with from the get-go. A number of blogs have come out in support of it, declaring that this is how we’ll be locating AirTags soon. There’s not much discussion surrounding the Find My network for Android users.

If there is anything that I remember particularly well while trying to play, Ecco the Dolphin 2: Tides of Timeit’s that first level with the crystal-like “glyphs” where you have to echolocate them to get them to move. This is what I imagine Bluetooth 6 will look like when it hits the market, pinging for devices that emit a certain type of connection — except it won’t require the help of your neighbor’s kid to get through that particular level.

Bluetooth 6.0 boasts that the addition of Channel Sounding will improve keyless entry between your phone and running cars. The feature will let developers “enhance the security” of the digital key with an extra layer that will only unlock the vehicle when it connects to an authorized device within a certain distance.

When it comes to Bluetooth peripherals like keyboards and game controllers, you can expect them to better switch between active and inactive states based on distance. This means that when you walk away from your desk with your mouse and keyboard still connected, your devices won’t be pressing random buttons or draining their remaining battery power trying to find a device to communicate with.

Bluetooth has not yet announced improved lossless audio streaming between devices. This particular version seems to be focused on improving the experience for connected devices, not the streaming experience. No Bluetooth 6 devices have been announced yet.