In order to further increase the applicability of Bluetooth in real applications, reducing the energy consumption and hardware cost are important research topics. In this paper we present a wireless communication prototype to support ubiquitous computing, which has been implemented based on commercial Bluetooth off-the-shelf components. It allows every object to be augmented with processing and communication capabilities in order to make them "smart". We investigate on the power characteristics of our Bluetooth prototype which supports the use of low-power modes providing helpful information for protocol developers and software designers. We assess if Bluetooth modules implementing low-power modes can significantly alleviate the power consumption of Bluetooth enabled devices. Our prototype has been used in a museum application to support spontaneous and ubiquitous connections between devices without requiring a priori knowledge of each other