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Jabra: we know our Bluetooth headsets don’t work with laptops

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51–60 of 171 posts

Re: Jabra: we know our Bluetooth headsets don’t work with laptops

#51
I really like my AfterShokz Trekz Air headphones. They work with all my devices. They reliably pair and don't oddly lose pairing status between any of them [0]. They are comfortable and sound pretty great once situated correctly. Not the greatest sound (a bit thin in the bass if they get out of alignment), but they are bone conducting and I generally use them to listen to music and still be able to hear the outside world. The behind-the-head band also makes it really easy to use them with all sorts of other head-mounted devices I have, like my brainwave sensor or my VR and AR headsets. For about 100USD, I've used them a lot more than my Sennheiser HD 4.50 BT headphones, which have a very annoying, periodic click when used in BT mode.

[0] Having worked on Bluetooth devices, this basically happens in devices because they reset their own hardware ID on complete power loss. Which is stupid. The hardware ID need never be reset unless explicitly requested by the user.

Re: Jabra: we know our Bluetooth headsets don’t work with laptops

#52

I've never known Bluetooth to not produce a miserable experience at some time or another. It's inconsistently bad in some cases too. I hate setting up bluetooth on my car the most, I need to "Talk" to my car, and I can't just do it while stopped at a red light, I have to shut off my car and do it before I go. I still havent redone it since I upgraded phones last year... I just plug into the aux port while driving .

All cars I've used that were bluetooth enabled (Volkswagen, Peugeot and Toyota I think) just required one pairing procedure once, and after that they would automatically connect to the phone as soon as you put the key in.

It's not so complicated and works fine. It's also much more practical to use the steering wheel controls for your phone's music rather than fiddling with its screen to skip a song.

Re: Jabra: we know our Bluetooth headsets don’t work with laptops

#53

I do wish we could collectively arrive at a better standard for customer support than "Support by Public Shaming". I'll admit to having used the "Send an email blast to the company executives" method in the past for dealing with airlines and telcos, but I feel like even that was a tad more discrete. At least it was an internal email and not a Twitter rant or a blog post. Regrettably, most companies seem to be removin…

It's not up to the customers to improve this state of affairs. It's entirely in the hands of the companies.

Re: Jabra: we know our Bluetooth headsets don’t work with laptops

#54
post #36
post #17

"Wait, are you saying the headset can’t connect to a computer via native Bluetooth? And you knew it the whole time? While you asked me to try a different device, to update drivers, to install Jabra software, to meet with your technician… You were just trying to wear me down?!?" This encapsulates what is most wrong and abhorrent about US customer service. This methodology is employed by thousands of companies, it is i…

It's far far worse in Europe ESPECIALLY if offshored to a low GDP country.

I went to a warranty provider of a well-known tech company, was turned down, then sent an e-mail to the "global warranty support" or whatever. Some Russian basically told me to go fuck myself. It was kind of funny (the response fit the "stereotypical Russian" image), but I'm never buying products from that company ever again.

Re: Jabra: we know our Bluetooth headsets don’t work with laptops

#55
Do you not have a small claims court in your area? Here in the UK if a product is not as described then you are entitled to a full refund from the supplier (not the manufacturer). As they are the ones you have a contract with. The supplier can take it up with the manufacturer. No help from the supplier? Then sue them, I've done that several times, it's cheap, easy and quick. I've never had a failure suing a business for a consumer protection issue.

https://www.smallclaimscourtgenie.co.uk/money-claim-online/

Re: Jabra: we know our Bluetooth headsets don’t work with laptops

#56
post #38

Reminds me of the time my wife cancelled our internet with Vodafone and three months later we got a letter to say our arrears were being referred to a debt collection agency. I spent an hour on the phone, talked to 8 different people to only end up back at the 1st person. They claimed we only cancelled the direct debit and not the account, I agreed that they would pull the call and if that was the case I'd pay what w…

Is the implication here that even after going all the way up to the CEO, Vodafone still only fixed it because of your association with your company?

I think the implication is that Vodafone later doxxed mywacaday's work persona and retaliated.

Classy.

Re: Jabra: we know our Bluetooth headsets don’t work with laptops

#57

I'm wondering about the technical issues they have with on-board bluetooth, specifically saying they only provide support for a USB dongle, and not on-board BT. I have routinely, with multiple computers seen that on-board BT has been flakey (MBP 2015, Zotac EN960, Zotac EN1060K, and a custom built PC w/ Intel on-board BT) with multiple devices (Bose QC35 headphones, multiple different BT keyboards). The experience ha…

One of the problems with achieving a good bluetooth experience is that there is not really one thing called "bluetooth", but rather a big stack of specifications that are implemented by different parties. A USB 2.0 BT adapter is very generic and probably well supported by more bluetooth devices and software stacks than integrated BT adapters.

Re: Jabra: we know our Bluetooth headsets don’t work with laptops

#58
post #38

Reminds me of the time my wife cancelled our internet with Vodafone and three months later we got a letter to say our arrears were being referred to a debt collection agency. I spent an hour on the phone, talked to 8 different people to only end up back at the 1st person. They claimed we only cancelled the direct debit and not the account, I agreed that they would pull the call and if that was the case I'd pay what w…

Is the implication here that even after going all the way up to the CEO, Vodafone still only fixed it because of your association with your company?

I think the implication is that despite contacting the CEO through a personal email address, Vodafone looked up his employer on LinkedIn and complained to them. From the sound of it, this would be petty revenge from the customer service department, who didn't like having been put in the spotlight for poor customer service.

Re: Jabra: we know our Bluetooth headsets don’t work with laptops

#59
post #6

Anyone have a Bluetooth earbuds that works flawlessly with Ubuntu? I recently got a pair of Funcl AI buds, works great with my phone but I connect on computer and there's constant skipping. I gather this is a common problem.

Unless I missed something, if it works it'll be with the SBC codec and it's not very good.

For music the BT profile is the Advanced Audio Distribution Profile (A2DP). But this is just a transport, and on top of it there can be many codecs. The only mandatory codec is SBC [1], which is BT specific and not very good. YMMV, but I prefer using a wired headphone than BT SBC.

There are other options, but then you need support on both ends. The best are AAC (Apple world), LDAC (Sony, all recent Android) and AptX HD (Android, Win10 I believe but TBC...). Those are supposed to be transparent, and for LDAC at least (the only one I have personal experience with) it is to my ears. Unfortunately last time I checked only SBC was supported on Linux... So I stick to wired on my Linux laptop, and use BT with LDAC on my smartphone only.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SBC_(codec)

Re: Jabra: we know our Bluetooth headsets don’t work with laptops

#60
post #15

I've never known Bluetooth to not produce a miserable experience at some time or another. It's inconsistently bad in some cases too. I hate setting up bluetooth on my car the most, I need to "Talk" to my car, and I can't just do it while stopped at a red light, I have to shut off my car and do it before I go. I still havent redone it since I upgraded phones last year... I just plug into the aux port while driving .

AirPods completely changed my view of BT devices. Before, I avoided BT completely because I could never get them working well with an Android phone I was using at that time. Headphones I was using would always disconnect after some time and the quality would drop intermittently and there was no way to fix it. The "fix" was to wait for the battery to drain and then the headphones would restart. I tried few different h…

Yeah, same here. I can't use any other Bluetooth headphones now, after trying AirPods. It's at the point where I've been thinking of buying very fancy wireless NC headphones, but haven't done so because I can't bear the absence of a W1 chip in either the Bose or the Sony (and obviously am not spending $350 for suboptimal Beats NC), so I'm just not buying anything.
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