Ultrawideband has apparently been taking too long: the Bluetooth Special Interest Group (Bluetooth SIG) this week announced plans to support Bluetooth over Wi-Fi within a year or so. The SIG is still working on Bluetooth over UWB, but says it wanted to support a more popular technology as well.

"Certified Wireless USB products have only begun to appear recently, so Bluetooth is turning to a more ubiquitous high-speed wireless technology to help with applications where Bluetooth's own bandwidth (with a theoretical maximum of 3 Mbps) is insufficient," explains Macworld's Yardena Arar.

"Devices will use the regular low-power Bluetooth radios to recognize each other and establish connections," writes ZDNet's Rik Fairlie. "If they need to transfer a large file, they will be able to turn on their Wi-Fi radios, then turn them off to save power after finishing the transfer."

More here from Wi-Fi Net News ... more here from Network World ... more here from EE Times ... more here from iTWire ... more here from unwir3d ... more here from mocoNews ... more here from TechSpot ... more here from the AP ... and the press release is here.