Bluetooth and Infrared: The Changing of the Guard

Anyone who used a cell phone in the early 2000s remembers the ritual: to pass a ringtone or a photo to a friend, you'd bring the two phones close together, line up the infrared windows, and stay perfectly still for a few seconds hoping the transfer wouldn't be interrupted. Move your hand even slightly and you had to start all over again.

In our archive that ritual has a precise expiration date. Infrared (986 models in total) reached its peak in 2004, when almost one phone in two had it: 49.7%, that is 225 models out of the 453 released that year. It's the highest point, and it's also the last.

Meanwhile, Bluetooth was on the rise, standing at just 17.4% in 2003 and 23.0% in 2004. The overtaking happens in 2005: 47.7% versus 44.4%. From that moment on, the two curves never cross again.

Year	Bluetooth	Infrared
2003	17.4%	42.3%
2004	23.0%	49.7%
2005	47.7%	44.4%
2006	69.2%	27.7%
2007	70.5%	12.8%
2008	72.2%	3.6%

The most interesting detail, though, isn't the overtaking: it's the coexistence. In 2005, 26% of models — 143 out of 549 — featured both technologies. Manufacturers still weren't confident enough to abandon infrared, because the accessory or computer on the other end might not have Bluetooth. Two years later that share had already dropped to 9.8%, and by 2008 to 3.1%.

The end comes very quickly. In 2011, models with infrared stood at 0.4%, in 2012 at 0.3%: isolated cases, no longer a design choice. Bluetooth, on the other hand, reached 99.4% in 2013 — practically every phone. There are 3,394 models in the archive equipped with it.

Traces of that transition remain in the spec sheets: the Panasonic X400 from 2004 has infrared and not Bluetooth, as do the Nokia 3200 from 2003 and the LG U8130. The Nokia N70, released in 2005 — the exact year of the overtaking — already has only Bluetooth.

Interested in another technology that changed the way we use phones in just a few short years? We cover it in WAP: The Archive's Fastest Rise.