If Bluetooth were a creature, it would have fascinated Darwin. Throughout its history it has been threatened on all sides by other standards, and has managed to adapt itself to seize a slightly different opportunity each time, and achieve its huge installed base in phones, PCs, headsets and cars. But other technologies continue to steal its best ideas and limit its potential once more, with Wi-Fi the most persistent. First the 802.11 community created a group to look at a very low power version for Bluetooth heartlands like home control, then it came up with an ad hoc mode which emulates the slower standard’s most distinctive characteristic. New research by In-Stat predicts that the new Wi-Fi Direct platform will cast…