iPod Touch Bluetooth
Why connect with iPod Touch Bluetooth
iPod Touch Bluetooth tethering has a set of advantages that might lead you to select it instead of Wi-Fi for routing your iOS device through an iPhone 4 Personal Hotspot. It also has a few drawbacks that might dissuade you.
For iPhone 3G and 3GS users, this form of iPod Touch Bluetooth tethering also allows other iOS devices to share a connection, which was previously impossible. (If either phone has iOS 4.0 to 4.2 installed, the sharing option appears as Internet Tethering. On an iPhone 3GS with iOS 4.3 installed, it’s labeled Personal Hotspot, though WiFi isn’t available as an option.)
The key advantage of iPod Touch Bluetooth tethering is simplicity, especially with a streamlined pairing process for securely connecting two devices over Bluetooth that Apple added to the iOS with the 4.3 update. You can also likely save battery power on both the iPhone acting as a hotspot and the device or devices you to tether to it: iPod Touch Bluetooth should consume less power than WiFi, even though modern WiFi has a lot of built in power conserving features.
What you’ll like best, though, is that using iPod Touch Bluetooth tethering sidesteps a major inconvenience with the Personal Hotspot feature. When you turn on the feature on your iPhone, Wi-Fi sharing is only enabled for 90 seconds unless a device connects via WiFi within that period. After 90 seconds with no connections, your phone’s WiFi radio turns off sharing to reduce battery usage. The same is true if you have WiFi devices connected, and then disconnect or power down all of them: a 90-second countdown ensues.
This adds a step to using Personal Hotspot when you’re using it during a commute, for instance. Instead of just pulling out your iPad, and waiting for it to connect, you have to first extract your iPhone, and navigate to the Personal Hotspot screen. WiFi availability should automatically start up just by visiting that screen, although I found in testing that I sometimes had to tap the Personal Hotspot switch from On to Off and back to On again. Then you put your iPhone away, and your iPad should connect to the iPhone’s mobile hotspot with no prompting.
iPod Touch Bluetooth sharing, in contrast, is always available with Personal Hotspot. In the scenario above, you’d leave your iPhone stowed and simply wake your iPad. The tablet should connect automatically. If it does not, you navigate to Settings, go to General -> Bluetooth, and tap the iPhone hotspot in the list of Bluetooth devices. The iPad then connects.
Bluetooth offers a level of security that’s equivalent to the WPA2 flavor of Wi-Fi encryption required by Apple for the Personal Hotspot feature. However, with Bluetooth, all the security is handled for you automatically. The pairing process confirms that no other party intercepted a key exchange; after that, strong encryption is used automatically with no data entry.
What’s the biggest downside to iPod Touch Bluetooth tethering? Throughput. Bluetooth 2.1+EDR, the flavor built into all iOS devices, has a raw rate of 3 Mbps and a net throughput that’s just a bit over 2 Mbps. That’s fine on Verizon’s 3G network, where average speeds never top 2 Mbps. On AT&T’s network and many other GSM networks worldwide the HSPA 7.2 standards allow realistic average speeds of 1 to 4 Mbps. Over iPod Touch Bluetooth, you’ll cap your highest potential, as WiFi can carry more than 30 Mbps between two devices. This should really give you a solid understanding on the iPod touch bluetooth.
