Earlier in September, Technology Futurist reported Ericsson's pullout of Bluetooth development, which certainly did not bode well for the technology, given the fact that the Swedish vendor was one of the major driving forces behind that industry. 

However, Bluetooth prospects are looking a lot brighter this week.  CNET reported earlier today that the Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG) made public its roadmap up to 2006.  As part of the announcement, SIG also mentioned the approval of the much antecipated Bluetooth 2.0 + EDR (Enhanced Data Rate) specification.  One of EDR's main advantages is that it can offer three times the bandwidth of other conventional Bluetooth protocols. 

Bluetooth adoption in the U.S. has been lagging other regions such as Europe.  It is hoped that the update will help stimulate the uptake in the U.S., since these latest enhancements can potentially make the technology more popular with computer and device manufacturers.  EDR changes the signal encoding system used by Bluetooth to enabling it to transmit at throughputs up to 3 megabits per second (which is several times faster than the third of a megabit or so of conventional Bluetooth 1.1 devices).  Simultaneously, EDR lowers power consumption and is still backwards compatible with older products (at slower data speeds).

The plans are posted on SIG's home page (registration is required, but it is free).