I'm a little surprised that there isn't broader availability of iBeacons at this stage... I feel I should be able to walk into an Apple store and buy a 10-pack of them for some reasonable price.
Because standalone iBeacons to trigger geofences is not what I believe Apple intends to use them for. This is what Estimote is selling.
Sure the geofence triggering is kinda cool, but I've yet to see a practical use of it. Seems like "interactive museum tour" is the thing everyone keeps coming back to. If this is what Apple wanted to do with iBeacons, they would be selling them for a couple bucks in Apple Stores. But iBeacons aren't a consumer device. I think much more likely to see "iBeacon ready" hardware sold by Apple and other 3rd parties.
I think iBeacon protocol will become part of other devices, as a way to add proximity detection for the iPhone/apps that could interact with that device.
How about a DSLR camera that I can pair with by touching my iPhone to it? Creating ad-hoc multi-peer networks between devices by being near them. Play a game on your phone on a nearby TV without connecting to same WiFi. Or wearables knowing which other wearables are nearby. This kind of natural, "magical" interaction is very Apple.
We also released a number of open source projects that can help with projects like this. Including the ibeacon cli (if you are on a mac just `brew install ibeacon`), or if you want more than iOS check out the Android iBeacon Library (https://github.com/RadiusNetworks/android-ibeacon-service).
I'm currently developing an app based on Gimbal: https://gimbal.com (made by Qualcomm).
My experience so far has been pretty good using their SDK (which works on iOS and Android) and their admin web interface, and the Gimbal devices themselves are not that expensive.
I'd be interested to hear the experiences of others using Gimbal..
* not really iBeacon compatible. They say you can flash their beacons to make them compatible, but i haven't found out how since their support is not responding.
Gimbal beacons have the suckiest battery life.
The ones that I had expired after only two months of usage.
Of course you can replace the battery (big plus) but the maintenance would be costly if deployed at a customer site.
For series 10, absolutely. Their series 20 seems to have better battery life (4 AA), but they need to "approve" you in order to purchase them... still yet to see one in the wild.
