Home > Tech Explained

What Is Bluetooth 5.1 and How Is It Different?

By Fabio Buckell
What Is Bluetooth 51 Featured

There is always room for improvement when it comes to technology. Bluetooth is one of the many technologies that needs to improve. With the latest version it looks like it’s taking a step in the right direction. Bluetooth 5.1 is here, and even though the improvements it brings are not monumental, they will come in handy.

Bluetooth 5.1 does have improvements you can be happy about, but it may be a while before you see it on the majority of the devices out there. While you wait, you can imagine all the things you can do with the new features.

Also read: What Is Bluetooth and How Does It Work?

What Is Bluetooth 5.1?

Bluetooth 5.1 is the latest version of the Bluetooth technology that allows you to exchange data between devices that are a short distance from one another. It’s the next step of the technology that you use to connect your headphone, speakers and other devices.

Keep in mind that when you can get your hands on a phone with Bluetooth 5.1, it will be useless if all your peripherals are not compatible with the latest Bluetooth version.

New Direction-Finding

blue-array

Unlike the previous version, Bluetooth 5.1 offers two methods of direction-finding: Angle of Arrival (AoA) and Angle of Departure (AoD). This means it can determine the exact position of a device (the direction the signal is coming from). For this to work the receiver or transmitter needs to have a batch of antennas.

Until now, Bluetooth could only guess how far the device could be by how strong the signal is. An improvement on that standard is excellent news if you’re always losing your Bluetooth earphones since your audio device will give you their exact location.

Improved GATT Caching

When a client device starts the connection process, it does so to see what the server device can support. What’s different in Bluetooth 5.1 is that instead of the waiting for the server to tell the client device what it wants to know, the client device can ask.

If something has changed, new service discovery is made. If everything remains the same, the service discovery part is skipped, and the connection is faster. Bluetooth 5.1 also allows for a faster connection and helps save power thanks to the GATT (Generic Attribute Profile) caching enhancements.

Also read: What to Do When Your Bluetooth Will Not Connect

Devices Will Advertise They’re Available to Connect

It can be a massive waste of time trying to connect to a device that won’t let you. Since you don’t know when you’ll be able to connect, you keep trying. Bluetooth 5.1 has a new feature called Randomized Advertising Channel Indexing.

What this new feature does is that it allows a Bluetooth device to announce when it’s available. Thanks to this feature you’ll be able to save battery power since your device will know when the other device is ready to connect.

blue-transfer

With Bluetooth 5.1 even low-energy devices benefit since the latest Bluetooth version also comes with Periodic Advertising Sync Transfer. This means your smartphone can get your TV’s advertising schedule as SyncInfo and send it to your low-powered device that can’t handle the periodic advertising sync.

Unlike Bluetooth 5.0, where devices had to go with a particular packet data, Bluetooth 5.1 lets devices choose the channels randomly. This new feature is helpful when you’re in an area where numerous devices are announcing that they are ready to connect.

Conclusion

Bluetooth 5.1 may not be a large jump, but it does come with necessary improvements. Are you happy with the new changes? Share your thoughts in the comments.

Subscribe to our newsletter!

Our latest tutorials delivered straight to your inbox

Fabio Buckell Avatar
Fabio Buckell
Just a simple guy that can’t enough of Technology in general and is always surrounded by at least one Android and iOS device. I’m a Pizza addict as well.

Read next

Russia still custom-builds the Soyuz return seats for ISS crew members using plaster casts taken weeks before launch, because astronauts grow as much as five centimetres taller during a long-duration stay and a seat moulded to their Earth-shaped spine would no longer fit the body that comes home
Close-up of a young adult using a smartphone outdoors, highlighting modern technology and connectivity.
The “CrackBerry” nickname stuck for a reason — and the variable-reward psychology that hooked early-2000s executives on their BlackBerrys is the exact same machinery now running every push notification on every smartphone in your pocket
In 1843, Ada Lovelace described a brass-and-punched-card engine that could act on symbols as well as numbers, even composing music if harmony could be reduced to rules, inside seven translator’s notes three times longer than the paper itself
Bright modern laboratory with computers and technical equipment for research and analysis.
ARPANET sent its first message on 29 October 1969 from a lab at UCLA to a machine at Stanford, and the message was supposed to read ‘LOGIN’ — but the system crashed after the L and the O, meaning the first word ever transmitted over the network that became the internet was, by accident, ‘LO’.
In 1995, Microsoft shipped a cartoon-house interface called Bob, led by Melinda French, who married Bill Gates while it was in development — it demanded twice the memory of a typical home PC, sold roughly 30,000 copies, and was dead within a year, leaving behind the font Comic Sans and the animated assistant that became Clippy.
Stunning underwater shot of tiger sharks swimming among fish in the ocean depths.
The Greenland shark grows about one centimetre a year, does not reach sexual maturity until around age 150, and a specimen carbon-dated by Danish researchers in 2016 was estimated to be at least 272 years old, meaning it was already swimming the North Atlantic when Mozart was composing symphonies.
A person using a smartphone with a green screen surrounded by fresh fruits and vegetables in the kitchen.
When Apple shipped iOS 12 in June 2018, a small feature called Screen Time slipped onto every iPhone with a counter nobody had quite prepared for — a tally of pickups — and within a day Tim Cook was telling CNN the number of times he picked up his own phone was simply too many
Starry night with radio towers and the Milky Way galaxy visible overhead.
When NASA lost contact with the IMAGE satellite in 2005, an amateur radio operator in Canada named Scott Tilley picked up its signal in January 2018 while hunting for a classified spy satellite, and the spacecraft turned out to be still spinning, still powered, and still trying to phone home after 13 years of silence.