What is the Point for Bluetooth 3.0?

Bluetooth is great for transferring data, pairing, streaming music, and connecting wireless devices. All of those functions, and surely some that I've missed, could be achieved with Bluetooth 1.x and 2.x. However, the Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG), the association behind Bluetooth standards, is about to release Bluetooth 3.0, which promises some upgrades like a more reliable connection and energy efficiency. However, one of the upgrades that is heralded is faster data transfer speeds.

The faster data transfers is all sound and good, but it requires WiFi. Essentially, to achieve the faster data rates, a device must have both Bluetooth and WiFi. According to PhoneScoop: "Bluetooth is used to create the pairing between two devices, but the data transfer itself is handed off to Wi-Fi. In order to take advantage of the higher transfer speeds, both devices need Bluetooth and Wi-Fi. If Wi-Fi isn't present on one of the devices, the spec reverts to Bluetooth for data transfer."

While energy efficiency and ease of pairing will be useful for Windows Phone, what we really need is a better WiFi or connections manager to setup, create ad-hoc networks from the devices, and join WiFi networks. If this is achieved in an easy and seamless way, the benefit of faster transfer speed from the Bluetooth 3.0 protocol is negated.