Joyful holidays! Right here is our present for you: over an hour of audio content material devoted to Bluetooth.

In the event you’re fortunate this vacation season, you could be given a brand-new telephone, pill, or gadget outfitted with the short-range wi-fi normal we’ve handled for many years. Although it has improved considerably since its introduction in 1998, it nonetheless has a lot of room to develop. Will Bluetooth get higher subsequent yr? That’s the impetus for as we speak’s Vergecast.

Naturally, we begin the present with a recreation. The Verge’s Nilay Patel, Alex Cranz, and Chris Welch sit in for a spherical of Bluetooth Jeopardy! — hosted by senior editor Sean Hollister. We’ll refresh your thoughts on the fundamentals of Bluetooth and maybe educate you just a few attention-grabbing info too. How effectively have you learnt the tech? We’ve even arrange a web-based recreation board so you may play together with the present.

Later within the episode, the crew will get again collectively to debate the state of Bluetooth, the way forward for the usual, and a few threats that face it within the years to come back. Plainly Bluetooth has maxed out its bandwidth lately, with corporations including their very own codecs atop it to assist better-quality audio. How way more can or not it’s improved?

For the ultimate section, Nilay, Alex, and Chris are joined by Dr. Michael Foley, the Bluetooth Particular Curiosity Group (SIG) govt director from 2004 to 2012, to debate the previous, current, and way forward for Bluetooth. Dr. Foley shares the small print of his position within the evolution of Bluetooth and the challenges of getting corporations to undertake the usual earlier than it grew to become ubiquitous in each gadget.

We had quite a lot of enjoyable making this episode, so we hope you get pleasure from it. Thanks a lot to everybody who listened to the present this yr. We actually admire it. Have a cheerful, secure, and Bluetooth-enabled vacation. We’ll see you in 2023!