The Next Major Version of Bluetooth Might Help Your Smartphone Find Things Faster

The Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG), the standards organization behind the tech that lets you wirelessly connect a pair of headphones, quietly announced an update to the specification this week. When it arrives, Bluetooth 6 will improve streaming between devices, and it vows to help find other Bluetooth devices within proximity faster by introducing a feature called Channel Sounding. This is the first significant update to the spec since Bluetooth 5 launched in 2016.

Channel Sounding adds “true distance awareness” for Bluetooth devices to better track things like AirTags down to the centimeter. The feature promises to improve the overall user experience of tracking down devices, making it “significantly easier and quicker” to locate lost items connected through a “Find My” network. It seems the ability was prioritized to comply with what Bluetooth calls the “‘Find My’ Phenomenon,” indicating this might be an Apple-compliant feature from the get-go. Plenty of blogs have rolled with it and declare that this is how we’ll locate AirTags soon. There’s little discourse around the Find My Device network for Android users. 

If there’s one thing I viscerally remember from attempting to play Ecco the Dolphin 2: The Tides of Time, it’s that first level with the crystal-looking “glyphs” where you’re supposed to echolocate the heck out of it to get them to budge. That is what I imagine Bluetooth 6 will be like when it hits the market, pinging around for any devices emitting a specific type of connectivity—except it won’t require help from the neighbor’s kid to get past that particular level.

Bluetooth 6.0 boasts that adding Channel Sounding will improve keyless entry between the phone and the cars enabled. The feature will allow developers to “enhance the security” of the digital key with an extra layer that only unlocks a vehicle when connected with an authorized device at a particular distance.

As for Bluetooth peripherals like keyboards and game controllers, you can expect them to better switch between active and inactive states based on distance. That means when you walk away from your desk with a mouse and keyboard still connected, the devices aren’t pressing stray buttons or sucking down leftover battery power as they attempt to find a device to communicate with. 

Bluetooth has yet to announce improved lossless audio streaming between devices. This particular version seems focused on improving the experience for connected devices rather than the experience of streaming. There are no devices announced with Bluetooth 6 quite yet.