The specification for the new version of BluŽetooth technology- unofficially referred to as Bluetooth 2.2 will be revealed sometime in mid-2009. The announcement came from the consortium of compaŽnies that form the technoloŽgy's Special Interest Group (SIG). SIG has clarified that the new profile will not be called Bluetooth 2.2. At the moment, the final nomenŽclature is not clear.

According to the SIG, BluŽetooth 2.2 will enable wireless video streaming, printŽing and other Wi-Fi related tasks. It will also meant that faster speeds than that under v1.1 can be achieved. It is expected that Bluetooth lOx devices will be released first followed by Bluetooth 100x, which if used along with Ultra Wide Broadband radio, may be able to give 480mbps of data transfer speed. BlueŽtooth lOx is expected to give better performance in Wi-Fi devices and this will be pretŽty useful especially in portable media players.

The current Bluetooth 2.1 standard offers a maximum transfer of 3Mbps and a lOx or 100x improvement means we might see speeds of 30Mbps and 300 Mbps respectively, which can make Bluetooth a competiŽtor to Wi-Fi. The new iPod Touch 2G has a Bluetooth chip embedded in it but it has not yet been activated. Once the final speCifications are released, we can expect Apple to release the update to enable Bluetooth 2.2 services.

WPA, widely used on today's Wi-Fi networks, is considered superior to the original WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy) standard, which most security professionals now deem insecure. Retail store chain T.]. Maxx was in the process of upgrading from WEP to WPA encryption when it experienced one of the most widely publicized data breaches in United States history, in which hundreds of millions of credit card numbers were stolen over a two-year period. The new WPA2 standard is considered safe from the recently developed attack. "Everybody has been sayŽing, 'Go to WPA because WEP is broken,'" Ruiu says. "This is a break in WPA."

If WPA is significantly compr?mised, it would be a blow for business customers who have been increasingly adopting it, says Sri Sundar alingam, vrce president of product management with wireless network security vendor AirTight Networks. Although customers can use other Wi-Fi technology such as WPA2 or virtual private network software that will protect them from this attack, many devices will still connect to the network via WPA, or even by way of the thoroughly cracked WEP standard, he says.