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ZDNET's key takeaways
- The Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG) released Bluetooth 6.0 in Sept. 2024.
- Its notable features pave the way for universal device tracking, lower latency, and more efficient wireless connections.
- Although newly released smartphones have adopted the new wireless standard, headphones and earbuds have not yet caught up.
Bluetooth and headphones go together like peanut butter and jelly; it's the technology that allows you to go wireless, but wireless listening isn't its only characteristic. Bluetooth versions are responsible for audio compression and transmission, as well as latency and connection stability. As the technology advances, you can look forward to getting more out of your headphones and earbuds.
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Despite the Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG) releasing the Bluetooth 6.2 core specification in Nov., you'll find that many headphones released as recently as this year still feature Bluetooth 5.3 or 5.4. Not every specification brings mind-blowing features, but there are connectivity, latency, and performance improvements to look forward to within the 6.0+ specifications.
This year, several smartphones but fewer headphones debuted with Bluetooth 6. As you expect to see more Bluetooth 6 products in 2026, here are its most notable features and what they mean for you.
Connection efficiency
Bluetooth 6 introduces improvements to how Bluetooth-enabled devices find and pair with one another, creating faster and smoother device pairing. Hopefully, this improvement will be most noticeable to people who like Bluetooth multipoint, a feature that allows one Bluetooth device to save multiple connections and switch between them.
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If you currently use Bluetooth multipoint, you may notice it's sometimes unreliable, glitchy, and frustrating, especially when switching a pair of headphones from a smartphone to a laptop or tablet. Bluetooth 6 features Decision-Based Advertising Filtering and Monitoring Advertisers, which improve interoperability and enable faster reconnections to previously paired Bluetooth devices.
Bluetooth's use of the term "advertising" has little to do with influencing your buying decisions and more to do with how devices broadcast their presence within a Bluetooth network. With improved advertising methods in Bluetooth 6, your headphones broadcast smaller, low-power signals to your devices to announce their ability to connect. Then, your phone can easily discover this connection for instant pairing without using much battery power.
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Your headphones and smartphone must have Bluetooth 6.0+ compatibility to take advantage of these features. Fortunately, many smartphones released in 2025, such as the Google Pixel 10 lineup and Apple iPhone 17 family, are equipped with Bluetooth 6. You'll just need to wait for headphone manufacturers to catch up.
Latency gains
Older Bluetooth versions experienced issues with audio/video latency, where a delay occurred between the audio you hear and the video you watch. Although more recent Bluetooth versions decreased latency for video-watching, as mobile gaming and AR/VR continue to evolve, so does the method of experiencing its audio via Bluetooth.
As a result, Bluetooth offers improvements to the Isochronous Adaptation Layer (ISOAL), which is responsible for transmitting real-time data, such as audio. Enhancing this technology optimizes multiple Bluetooth layers, enabling faster transmission speeds and larger data transfers tailored to your audio needs.
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Thus, mobile gamers may not need to wire their headphones or earbuds to their device for unnoticeable latency. Additionally, console and PC gamers may find more flexibility in their everyday headphones and earbuds, finding that they can handle the audio demands of single-player games.
Universal device tracking
Bluetooth Channel Sounding is a highly anticipated feature of Bluetooth 6, thanks to its potential to democratize Find My Device technology. It offers centimeter precision for device tracking, allowing users to locate devices, such as headphones, that are not equipped with an ultra-wideband (UWB) chip.
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UWB chips also offer precise device location, but they are more expensive and more complicated to integrate into every device's motherboard. Earbuds like Apple's AirPods include a UWB chip, which enables them to be detected within your Find My network. However, most headphones don't have a UWB chip, so Bluetooth aims to offer Channel Sounding as an alternative solution.
Channel Sounding utilizes Phase-based Ranging (PBR) and Round-trip Time (RTT) technologies to transmit and calculate the distance and direction between two Bluetooth devices. Given that Channel Sounding operates on Bluetooth's Low Energy (LE) network, and most device chips are already compatible with Bluetooth, the need for UWB chips in headphones and earbuds significantly decreases.
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With Channel Sounding, your smartphone from one manufacturer could locate your earbuds from another manufacturer, provided both devices are equipped with Bluetooth 6 or higher. There aren't many mainstream headphones and earbuds available in the US with Bluetooth 6, but this will likely change in 2026.
The adoption of newer wireless technologies is typically slower for headphones and earbuds compared to smartphones. Case in point: the iPhone 17 has Bluetooth 6, but the AirPods Pro 3 have Bluetooth 5.4.
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However, you shouldn't expect Apple to adopt these technologies anytime soon, as the company prefers its proprietary wireless technologies. The latest real-world applications of Bluetooth's innovations are easier to use with Google's Pixel devices.
Earlier this year, Google expanded Bluetooth Auracast support to more smartphones, headphones, earbuds, and hearing aids, enabling users to share audio with other devices that also support the Bluetooth standard. So, if you're in the US and want to be an early adopter of Bluetooth's latest technologies, an Android phone is the way to go.
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