What are the differences between each version of Bluetooth?

Bluetooth is a data transmission standard rather specifically focused on short range communications between compatible devices. First coming to market in devices in the very late 1990s, the Bluetooth Standard has evolved over time with a number of significant revisions that have changed how Bluetooth is used, though the standard idea of using radio waves for data transmission is still at the heart of every Bluetooth chip.

Bluetooth is relatively cheap and simple to implement in a product, which is a big part of the reason why it’s so widespread in consumer electronics, because the cost of implementing it is relatively low. More modern versions of the Bluetooth standard offer lower power consumption and faster and more reliable connectivity between devices, but even in the earliest revisions Bluetooth was built around the concept of “pairing” devices together so that they could share data.

So when you connect up your smartphone to your wireless headphones you’re creating a paired connection between them to send and receive data – in this case, audio that you want to listen to from your phone, or commands such as play/pause or voice data from your buds to your phone for pausing music or answering phone calls. 

Why is it called Bluetooth?

Bluetooth gets its name from King Harald “Bluetooth” Gormsson (or Blåtand if you want to be pedantically specific about it), a Danish king who united the people of Norway and Denmark back in 958. 

Why King Harald, though? Largely because the original designers of the standard were companies that were mostly Scandinavian, that’s why. Harald was known as “Bluetooth” due to the presence of a dead tooth in his mouth which went blue/grey, but while that’s all kinds of gross, the idea here is that just as King Harald united the Scandinavian tribes under a single banner, Bluetooth unites devices under a standard communications protocol.

Is Bluetooth just another form of Wi-Fi?

No, not exactly. While both Bluetooth and Wi-Fi are data transmission standards, and both can operate around the unregulated 2.4Ghz radio bands, they are different technologies, overseen by different consortiums and essentially with slightly different markets in mind. Wi-Fi typically has higher power usage but in return works at significantly higher data rates than Bluetooth is capable of, as it was originally intended to be a wireless replacement for physical ethernet cables. 

That’s why you use Wi-Fi most likely for your home Internet, because it can handle data quickly, and it doesn’t matter as much about power if the Wi-Fi router is plugged into a wall socket anyway. Bluetooth uses lower power and shifts data at lower rates, making it a better match for lower-power intense activities that might be more mobile, such as Bluetooth headsets or game controllers.

Need is relative, but for the most part at a consumer level, the detail to remember is that Bluetooth is backwards compatible, so older Bluetooth devices can be seen and paired to newer ones.

However, that does entail using the oldest specification in the pairing stack, so if you pair a set of Bluetooth 4.2 headphones to a Bluetooth 5.3 capable smartphone, all you’d be getting would be Bluetooth 4.2 style performance.

Need is also relative to what you want to do with a given Bluetooth device. For most headphones this should be a fairly automatic pairing process unless a manufacturer has some kind of very specific control system in place, typically an app you’d need to install to get access to additional features rather than a Bluetooth-specific feature, however. For devices such as trackers, however, for more precise finding you’d need to have devices that support the right level of location data transmission. 

In nearly every case here the answer is no, you can’t. Some devices may be produced that allow for smaller Bluetooth updates over firmware, but that’s usually just within a given Bluetooth release version, and often it’s more of a software tweak specific to that device than an actual jump up in Bluetooth versions.

If you’ve got two devices and one of them is lacking in Bluetooth compatibility with the other, the easiest way to update them is to actually update the older device to one that’s sporting a newer Bluetooth standard in most cases.