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Bluetooth remains an 'unusually painful' technology after two decades

cnn.com

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Re: Bluetooth remains an 'unusually painful' technology after two decades

#101

Post by mrweasel »

pondidum wrote: post #9

I've not had problems with bluetooth for years. Printers on the other hand, never seem to work smoothly. How?

The only Bluetooth issues I’v had are weird ones. Apparently I’m to tall for Bluetooth, at least the cheap headphones I bought. Place the phone in my left hand pocket and the headphones, which have the antenna on the right can barely pickup the signal.

The there’s the implementation, and I cannot figure out how they messed up this one: Concept2 have an iOS app for their rowing machines. The previous version would pair the second you asked the rowing machine to connect. The new versions three to five times slower. It’s the same bluetooth stack, why would pairing change?

Re: Bluetooth remains an 'unusually painful' technology after two decades

#102

Post by baq »

kristopolous wrote: post #45
darkwater wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And oh man does it have issues. Oftentimes you have to do SNMP. Take scanning for instance, many devices will just give you compressed JPEGs over their HTTP interface without any option for choosing otherwise Just one data point (mine) but I have one of the cheapest HP Deskjet you can buy with scanner included, it works smoothly, no actions needed via wifi with Linux, I can set the DPI, save it as PNG or PDF, it's…

Brother is one of the biggest offenders here I've found. I've also found an HP with an issue as well but I haven't diagnosed it. I'm typing this from my bed on a phone so sorry I don't have the references on me What's your model?

Interesting since past printer threads highlighted Brother as a reliable brand. Anecdotally I've got a ~10 year old Brother laser printer+scanner and it still works great, but needs a Brother app to print from Apple devices since it doesn't support the new standard protocol.

Re: Bluetooth remains an 'unusually painful' technology after two decades

#103

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #4

People seem to complain a lot about Bluetooth, yet I owned dozens of devices of all vintages and they all played nicely with each other, except for a cheapo pair of MPow earbuds off Amazon. I even managed to transfer old school photos off my ancient 2003 NEC flip phone to my current Android phone even though the former uses Bluetooth 1.1 and the latter 5.1. I also fondly remember using Bluetooth in school to transfer…

> the spec is very complex

I once printed out the BT5 spec (just the core), for Ss and Gs (on my employer's dime).

I had a stack of 3-inch (large) 3-ring binders on my desk, reaching 2ft high (0.6m).

It was well over 2,000 pages. It would have been five times that, if I had printed out the various profiles, and whatnot.

BT is crazy. The difference between "Classic" and BLE is frustrating.

I suspect that soon, all BT devices will be cribbing from the BLE playbook. It is a lot more usable than BR/EDR, but the data rate sucks. I think that changes to that, are on the horizon.

Re: Bluetooth remains an 'unusually painful' technology after two decades

#104

Post by kyaghmour »

thiagocsf wrote: post #98
kyaghmour wrote: post #92

Because it's RF, shipping firmware can't be open source -- end user tweakable and replaceable. I bet this is one reason BT will never be good. If it could be open source there would be a winning stacks (or a few) that would bubble up on some git repo and be good enough for most everyone.

Is that because of regulation? What’s the concern of having open source for RF firmwares?

Regulatory requirements and certification.

Re: Bluetooth remains an 'unusually painful' technology after two decades

#105

Post by michaelt »

ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #40
t_mann wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'It's not Bluetooth's fault, everyone is just using it wrong' does not sound good.

I mean, if I give you a hammer, and you use it to drive nails by hitting them with the handle, then it's not really the hammer's fault, is it? What makes complex tech components like Bluetooth any different? Also, Bluetooth isn't a single product made by a single company that dictates the standard and has the golden implementation. To have Bluetooth audio between your phone and you PC for example, you can have differ…

> What makes complex tech components like Bluetooth any different?

A hammer will be reliable if the user uses it correctly, which it's possible to do.

With bluetooth I have the most popular, widely sold smartphone and the most popular, widely sold sports watch. They both claim to be compatible. I'm using both precisely as instructed. And sometimes they just.... don't see one another.

This isn't user error.

Re: Bluetooth remains an 'unusually painful' technology after two decades

#106

Post by id »

grnmamba wrote: post #83
bigbillheck wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They most certainly were not: https://www.engadget.com/2009-06-29-nokia-apple-rim-and-othe...

Ok, so since 2009 everyone except Apple was on USB.

No, because there were many other manufacturers.

Re: Bluetooth remains an 'unusually painful' technology after two decades

#107

Post by toxik »

smackeyacky wrote: post #58
nine_k wrote: post #54

I tried to learn why BT is still somehow painful to use, and the article basically does not have an answer. My take from comments here and my experience: - Makers of BT devices can't agree on many important common things (easy discovery / pairing mode, priority, etc), and have little incentive to seek agreement. It's like phone chargers before USB. - Makers of BT devices tend to cut corners and/or add not-entirely-st…

They do agree on an awful lot of stuff, but the tools provided by the Bluetooth guys aged very poorly (i.e. their tools for generating GATT interfaces as C code is absolute garbage, full of holes and has a built-in buffer overflow capability). The one thing nobody seems to do is stick to the standards provided, because they simply aren't broad enough for the creative stuff that people do with Bluetooth and Bluetooth…

Something I’ve noticed is that Bluetooth breaks down around major construction sites, like infrastructure projects. It’s very strange, I wonder if they have some kind of high power BT transmitters for some reason.

Re: Bluetooth remains an 'unusually painful' technology after two decades

#109

Post by blackhaz »

crb wrote: post #96
blackhaz wrote: post #91

My car (Lexus) and my iPhone X: The car detects iPhone presence, like, 50% of the time. If it does detect it, it shows me a couple of half-naked shaved guys hugging each other and begins playing "Songs of Innocence" the moment I turn the ignition on. I tried deleting this song from the iPhone, but it auto-magically restores itself somehow, as if it is in the telephone's firmware. The image of men hugging in shade is…

FWIW, the men are father and son; the lower man is U2's drummer Larry Mullen Jr.

I don't know if it's for much better or much worse, but this allows me some freedom of thought now. Thank you, sir.

Re: Bluetooth remains an 'unusually painful' technology after two decades

#110

Post by arein3 »

kyaghmour wrote: post #92

Because it's RF, shipping firmware can't be open source -- end user tweakable and replaceable. I bet this is one reason BT will never be good. If it could be open source there would be a winning stacks (or a few) that would bubble up on some git repo and be good enough for most everyone.

Is that a law?

There are ath9k wifi cards with open source firmware https://github.com/qca/open-ath9k-htc-firmware

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