Bluetooth SPP (Serial Port Profile) is intended to replace RS-232 cables (or other serial communication interfaces). SPP is excellent for sending and receiving bursts of data/information between two devices.
Bluetooth Low Energy — also known as Bluetooth Smart — is a major release of the Bluetooth standard designed to optimize energy consumption and speed to work with extremely low power applications. Bluetooth Low Energy also simplifies the user experience by circumventing the typical process of having to pair through the host device’s Bluetooth settings before the application — with BLE the user need only pair through the application itself. However, this improvement does not come without some drawbacks; BLE sacrifices range to achieve faster speeds (up to 10 times faster than other Bluetooth profiles) and decreased energy consumption.
Bluetooth HID (Human Input Device) is a wireless spinoff of the HID profile original standardized for USB input devices (in fact, Bluetooth HID is often referred to as “keyboard mode”). Just as Bluetooth SPP serves to replace serial interfaces (e.g., RS-232 or UART), Bluetooth HID serves to replace USB connections.
Bluetooth MFi (Made for iOS) is a proprietary Bluetooth profile by Apple explicitly designed to work with Apple’s mobile operating system, iOS (iPhone, iPods, and iPads). Apart from the specific proprietary nature, MFi works similarly to Bluetooth SPP.
Real-time cabled mode is used when the user wants to output the scanned data to their computer real-time or immediately after the scanner reads the data.
Batch mode is ideal for when the user wants to use the scanner wirelessly to accumulate all the scanned data in the scanner’s internal memory until the scanner is plugged into a host device (typically a Windows or Mac computer). Once plugged into the host device, the batch data can be sent all at once to the cursor location (e.g., a program, web application or text file) or downloaded to a text or CSV file by a program such as SerialMagic Professional.