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Best iBeacon hardware crowned following extensive stress tests

A new report from AisleLabs shared with 9to5Mac ahead of its release examines the various Bluetooth beacon hardware options that support the ‘iBeacon’ technology Apple introduced last year. The extensive testing resulted in winners for four categories including style, performance, value for money, and built-in spoof protection.

There are several companies selling Bluetooth beacons and services with support for iBeacon, Apple’s framework for allowing apps on iOS devices to talk with Bluetooth beacons for location-based features. In its report, Aislelabs takes a look at the most popular and offers results from a three month stress test of the products.

In order to accurately measure battery life of each beacon, we placed each beacon configured with different settings in our lab for 3 months. Over the three month period, we regularly measured the battery level (starting at 100% and decreasing over time). We also measured the current draw, in milliamperes, for each beacon… We experimented beacons with different configuration of tx power and advertising intervals. Each beacon has its own default values, in order to compare them all, we set them to a tx power of -12 dBmW and an advertising interval of 645 ms, which we refer to as Optimized iBeacon Settings.

After examining firmware, SDKs, battery life, chipsets, and performing stress tests under various conditions, the report awards 4 beacons the top spots based on Style (Estimote), Performance (Kontakt), Value for money (Minew), and Built-in Spoof Protection (Gimbal):

As for the lowest performing beacon in terms of battery life, Gimbal takes the spot with its thin beacon’s 240 mAh battery lasting only 1 month compared to the average 10 months for most other options. Aislelabs notes that “Gimbal provides an additional layer of Bluetooth MAC randomization, not available in other chipsets, which comes at the cost of battery drain.”

The full report and analysis from Aislelabs, which examines a total of 16 Bluetooth beacon products, is available on the company’s website here.

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Comments

  1. Casey Marvin - 10 years ago

    I was surprised to see Sonic Notify’s beacon off of the testing list. Sonic Notify has been in this space since 2011 owns three patents, has nearly 20,000 beacons deployed worldwide and over 1.4M impressions.

  2. Neha Mallik (@MallikNeha) - 10 years ago

    This is interesting! Today, with so many beacon players in the market, it can be tough to keep track of all the companies innovating in this space. In fact, with 79% of UK brands planning to implement proximity marketing over the next 6 months, most beacon providers are busy engineering beacons that are more energy efficient and better at location accuracy. We have talked about the 3 new beacon hardware players to watch out for in 2015 here: http://blog.mobstac.com/2015/03/3-new-beacon-hardware-players-to-watch-out-for/

Author

Avatar for Jordan Kahn Jordan Kahn

Jordan writes about all things Apple as Senior Editor of 9to5Mac, & contributes to 9to5Google, 9to5Toys, & Electrek.co. He also co-authors 9to5Mac’s Logic Pros series.


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