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60 free Bluetooth trivia questions with answers — technology quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This Bluetooth trivia quiz covers the wireless standard that quietly connects billions of headphones, keyboards, cars and watches. The easy questions are ones any gadget owner can take a swing at: which Viking king the technology is named after, what the logo is made of, what frequency band it uses, roughly how far a phone can reach, and which company started it all in Lund, Sweden. From there it moves into the engineering: frequency hopping, piconets, classes and power, pairing methods and the profiles that let a phone talk to a headset or a heart-rate monitor. The harder end is for engineers and tech-history fans: the two names that were supposed to replace the Bluetooth placeholder, the five founding companies of the SIG, the first phone and laptop to ship with it, the Nokia project that became Bluetooth Low Energy, the version that added Enhanced Data Rate, secure simple pairing, Auracast, mesh, the 1.78 km range record, bluejacking, bluesnarfing and the 2017 BlueBorne exploits. Every answer was checked against encyclopaedia entries on the standard, its inventors and its history before publishing, and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. If you enjoy this one, try our Wi-Fi, smartphone and computer history quizzes next.
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Q 01Bluetooth is named after a 10th-century king of which country?
Denmark
Harald Bluetooth united the Danish tribes into one kingdom, and the name was meant to suggest uniting communication protocols.
Q 02The Bluetooth logo is a bind rune combining which two Younger Futhark runes?
Hagall and Bjarkan
It merges the Younger Futhark runes Hagall and Bjarkan, standing for H and B.
Q 03Bluetooth radios operate in which frequency band?
2.4 GHz
It shares the globally unlicensed ISM band with microwave ovens and much Wi-Fi traffic.
Q 04In its most widely used mode, Bluetooth's range is roughly how far?
Up to 10 metres
Transmission power in that mode is limited to just 2.5 milliwatts.
Q 05Which Swedish company began developing the short-link radio technology that became Bluetooth in 1989?
Ericsson
Nils Rydbeck, CTO at Ericsson Mobile in Lund, initiated it to develop wireless headsets.
Q 06Which Dutch engineer, who led a group of engineers in Lund, is credited as the inventor of Bluetooth?
Jaap Haartsen
He was inducted into the US National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2015.
Q 07Who proposed the name Bluetooth in 1997, and for which company did he work?
Jim Kardach of Intel
He got the idea from a conversation about Viking history and a picture of Harald's runestone.
Q 08Bluetooth was only a placeholder codename. Which two names were candidates to replace it at launch?
RadioWire and PAN
PAN was the front runner until a search found tens of thousands of hits online, and RadioWire's trademark search could not be finished in time.
Q 09Which historical novel about Vikings sparked the conversation that led to the Bluetooth name?
The Long Ships
Frans G. Bengtsson's novel was recounted to Jim Kardach by the engineer Sven Mattisson.
Q 10Which five companies were the original members of the Bluetooth SIG when it launched in May 1998?
Ericsson, Intel, Nokia, Toshiba, IBM
IBM and the Swedish firm were the founding signatories after a plan to build a phone into a ThinkPad proved too power-hungry.
Q 11Where is the Bluetooth Special Interest Group headquartered?
Kirkland, Washington
The SIG is a not-for-profit corporation that publishes the specifications and protects the trademarks but makes no products itself.
Q 12Roughly how many member companies does the Bluetooth SIG have?
More than 35,000
A manufacturer must meet SIG standards to market a product as a Bluetooth device.
Q 13Under which IEEE standard number was Bluetooth once standardized?
802.15.1
The IEEE no longer maintains the standard; the SIG does.
Q 21What is the name for an ad hoc network of Bluetooth devices sharing one master's clock?
A piconet
The master transmits in even time slots and receives in odd ones.
Q 22What is the maximum power output of a Class 1 Bluetooth radio?
100 mW
Class 2, the type in most battery-powered devices, tops out at 2.5 mW.
Q 23An August 2004 experiment extended the range of a Class 2 Bluetooth radio to a record of about how far?
1.78 km
It used directional antennas and signal amplifiers, a practice known as Bluetooth sniping.
Q 24What is the shared secret created when two Bluetooth devices pair called?
Q 14What kind of product was the first Bluetooth device revealed in 1999?
A hands-free headset
It won the Best of Show Technology Award at COMDEX.
Q 15Which phone from the Swedish firm behind Bluetooth was the first commercially available Bluetooth handset in 2001?
R520m
The T36 was an unreleased prototype; the revised T39 reached shelves in June 2001, after the R520m.
Q 16Which laptop, launched in October 2001, was the first notebook with integrated Bluetooth?
IBM ThinkPad A30
IBM had contributed patents around the logical layer to the standard.
Q 17Which radio technique lets Bluetooth resist interference by switching frequencies many times a second?
Frequency-hopping spread spectrum
Adaptive frequency hopping later let it avoid crowded frequencies in the sequence.
Q 18How many designated 1 MHz channels does classic Bluetooth hop between?
79
Bluetooth Low Energy instead uses 40 channels with 2 MHz spacing.
Q 19How many hops per second does a classic Bluetooth link usually make?
1,600
Each hop lands on one of the band's 1 MHz-wide channels.
Q 20One master device can communicate with at most how many slave devices at once?
Seven
Two or more piconets can link into a scatternet, with some devices playing master in one and slave in another.
A link key
Devices that both store the same one are said to be paired or bonded, and can reconnect without pairing again.
Q 25Headsets with almost no inputs traditionally used which fixed PIN codes for legacy pairing?
0000 or 1234
Any 16-byte UTF-8 string could technically be a PIN, but such devices hard-code a simple one.
Q 26Which Bluetooth release introduced Secure Simple Pairing as its headline feature?
2.1 + EDR (2007)
It was adopted by the SIG on 26 July 2007 and uses a form of public-key cryptography.
Q 27Which Secure Simple Pairing method shows a 6-digit code on both devices for the user to compare?
Numeric Comparison
It protects against man-in-the-middle attacks, provided the user actually compares the numbers.
Q 28Which pairing method requires no user interaction and offers no man-in-the-middle protection?
Just Works
It is typical for headsets with minimal input and output capabilities.
Q 29What did the EDR in Bluetooth 2.0 + EDR stand for?
Enhanced Data Rate
It raised the raw data rate to 3 Mbit/s using phase-shift keying modulation.
Q 30Bluetooth 3.0 + HS reached 24 Mbit/s by handing bulk data to which other radio technology?
802.11 Wi-Fi
The Bluetooth link only negotiated and set up the connection; the high-speed part was optional and marked with a +HS logo.