Originally Posted by
njkayaker
I was talking about BTLE support on the iPhones (which where basically the first to have it).
Though, only a few Android phones support ANT+. (It seems that a few Android phones have ANT+ support turned-off but can be "hacked" to turn it on.)
Smartphones have to support BT. They don't have to support ANT+.
There's a licensing fee to use ANT+. I believe it applies to recievers (but it might only apply to transmitters).
BT is much more universal. Many more things use it and it's used for many more different things. (If there's a licensing fee associated with BT, it's irrelevant because phones have to support it.)
ANT+ is much more of a niche thing. I'd expect that support for it is going to be more hit-or-miss.
As far as I understand, it's easy to support BTLE (smart) and ANT+ on the same chip. The reason not to support ANT+ is extra cost to service a small market.
As far as I understand, ANT+ isn't better than BTLE (the design of BTLE was "informed" by ANT+).
It might make sense phase-out ANT+ and use BTLE but you'd need Garmin's cooperation for that (think "snowballs in hell").
I think Garmin was one of the companies behind the ANT+ standard. I doubt they will change until everyone else changes.
I feel like the future of these will be low power Bluetooth (BTLE) but it's not quite there yet in the bike sensor world. You can see the handwriting on the wall with the chips coming out that support BTLE and ANT+ simultaneously. Once the BTLE stuff is out there, it opens up the app world on the smartphones in a very big way.
That said, I don't think there is an exclusive pairing process in ANT+ like BT. So any ANT+ capable head should be able to read the existing ANT+ sensor as long as it's been trained to look for that sensor.
J.