I don't really think that Bluetooth is an industry-wide practical prank that's gotten totally out of control (you weren't let in on the joke, and I wasn't either), but I do think that it's nearly indistinguishable from one.
Bluetooth 5 Now Available
111–120 of 170 posts
Re: Bluetooth 5 Now Available
#112Considering every phone I've tested (iPhone 5S, iPhone 6+, Samsung Note, Moto X, Nexus 6P) with 7 different bluetooth headphones (ranging from cheap Amazon ones to expensive LG) I have NEVER found a phone, paired with headphones, that stayed connected especially when the phone is in my side pocket and I'm walking in an open space which seems to make connectivity significantly worse. For instance getting on the BART b…
Getting 2.4GHz through the human body is hard. The human body is mostly water, and bluetooth is, after all, the same frequency of your microwave oven, which uses 2.4GHz because it's in a band of frequencies from 1-20GHz that water absorbs. When you're indoors, you don't need to get bluetooth through your body. You're getting reflections off of nearby walls and ceilings which allow your bluetooth devices to communicat…
This was a magnificent explanation, and precisely the kind of comment I hope for when reading HN. Thank you for taking the time to share.
Re: Bluetooth 5 Now Available
#113Why hasn't Bluetooth been dumped for audio applications? The bit rate is atrocious even to a non audiophile, while my 5.8ghz wireless headphones for PC sound fantastic. Why is this?
Re: Bluetooth 5 Now Available
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
You worked on BT specs ? BT seems an acute case of design by comittee. It's huge, full of profiles and corners. Nobody implements it really well, everything moves before it's finished. Makes you dream of wires some times.
As a user i kinda like the profiles, in particular the OBEX based ones. This because it means i can expect two devices to be able to share files out of the box if both of them have a bluetooth radio. Nothing like that exist for wifi, and i have to set up some client-server scheme to make anything happen.
The OBEX profiles predate even BT, they were inherited from IrDA. IrDA was an earlier method for transferring business cards or similar small files between hand held devices over an infra-red link link.
Re: Bluetooth 5 Now Available
#115Still no audio profile that supports Opus. Why are we still using a 20 year old audio codec (SBC) for Bluetooth speakers? Opus is low enough bitrate that it could even theoretically be used over BLE (ignoring latency problems), while still wiping the floor with SBC. Regardless of whether BLE transport is possible, it depresses me that Opus support still hasn't been added to the A2DP.
Bluetooth 5 now has enough bandwidth to do uncompressed 16/44.1 stereo PCM in real world situations.
Bluetooth has also optionally supported device-side AAC and MP3 encoding (which Apple now supports, after 10+ years of being in this game, on exactly one chipset: theirs, the W1, via iTunes only, or AAC only).
Re: Bluetooth 5 Now Available
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not really all bluetooth what you're describing there. Almost all of it is implementation-specific: many vendors do a sad job at implementing bluetooth, or if they buy a module as-is, they do a bad job at integrating that module.
Maybe it's still Bluetooth SIG's fault for not making a spec that is easier to adhere to.
Even if the SIG would pay implementors to do it right, it would be done wrong. Some vendors just don't care. Same goes for USB3 cables for example. It's not that hard to do it right, but many just don't care or don't want to.
Re: Bluetooth 5 Now Available
#117Considering every phone I've tested (iPhone 5S, iPhone 6+, Samsung Note, Moto X, Nexus 6P) with 7 different bluetooth headphones (ranging from cheap Amazon ones to expensive LG) I have NEVER found a phone, paired with headphones, that stayed connected especially when the phone is in my side pocket and I'm walking in an open space which seems to make connectivity significantly worse. For instance getting on the BART b…
Use a wire.
Re: Bluetooth 5 Now Available
#118Considering every phone I've tested (iPhone 5S, iPhone 6+, Samsung Note, Moto X, Nexus 6P) with 7 different bluetooth headphones (ranging from cheap Amazon ones to expensive LG) I have NEVER found a phone, paired with headphones, that stayed connected especially when the phone is in my side pocket and I'm walking in an open space which seems to make connectivity significantly worse. For instance getting on the BART b…
I've got Bose QC35 and Jaybird X2's. I use the jaybirds to workout, Bose for everything else - never had a problem with either one staying connected. Including being across the room from both, with the phone in my pocket. That encompasses a Nexus 6P and a Pixel.
Re: Bluetooth 5 Now Available
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hi! RF Engineer here. Bluetooth sucks for a number of reasons, only a few of which actually relate to RF. First, we're bad at naming things. Is it BLE? Bluetooth Smart? BTLE? Bluetooth 4.0, or Bluetooth 4 Low Energy? And what does this have to do with ANT+? This doesn't seem to be a big problem, but it's a sign of deeper problems with the spec. In the long run it makes it very difficult for developers to implement. B…
You worked on BT specs ? BT seems an acute case of design by comittee. It's huge, full of profiles and corners. Nobody implements it really well, everything moves before it's finished. Makes you dream of wires some times.
Not that I disagree with you, but I would love to see examples where it would be the opposite and you would say it was a beautiful and well implemented.
Tends to be hard to implement a specification without any implementation to test it out together with it, but those who do work out, should be looked into why so we all can learn from it.
Re: Bluetooth 5 Now Available
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hi! RF Engineer here. Bluetooth sucks for a number of reasons, only a few of which actually relate to RF. First, we're bad at naming things. Is it BLE? Bluetooth Smart? BTLE? Bluetooth 4.0, or Bluetooth 4 Low Energy? And what does this have to do with ANT+? This doesn't seem to be a big problem, but it's a sign of deeper problems with the spec. In the long run it makes it very difficult for developers to implement. B…
You worked on BT specs ? BT seems an acute case of design by comittee. It's huge, full of profiles and corners. Nobody implements it really well, everything moves before it's finished. Makes you dream of wires some times.
I was involved in the 1.0 Bluetooth specifications and can confirm it was "designed by committee". IIRC the original wireless specification came from either Nokia or Ericsson and they drove a lot of the initial development. They had already developed the RF technology before the Bluetooth SIG was even formed. The original stated goal for Bluetooth was "cable replacement". Features such as pairing a headset to a phone, or a phone to a laptop were an essential part of the original profiles.
A reason for the complexity was that the BT 1.0 profiles often leveraged existing technology, for example:
- RFCOMM was a way of sending arbitrary serial data, reusing RS232 comms which were very common.
- OBEX was a way of sending data which was previously sent over IrDA
- The "LAN access profile" basically said "use RFCOMM to do PPP over a serial link like you do with a modem"
If you tried to implement any of these from scratch then not only do you have to implement the BT part, you also have to implement the technologies that BT reused.
If you look at the initial SIG members, Nokia and Ericsson took care of the initial phone developments. Intel, IBM, Microsoft and Toshiba represented the PC side of things. I was working for 3Com at the time and we were interested in it as a short range network technology. 3Com developed a network device conforming to the "LAN access profile" but it was never released. 3Com also owned Palm and they were interested in incorporating BT with the hand held devices.
It is interesting to compare BT to Wireless Ethernet (IEEE 802.11) world. The IEEE Ethernet (802.3) specifications are pretty much only concerned with getting data packets from A to B at layers 0 through 2. At layer 3 and above they don't care if those packets are IPv4, IPv6 or some other protocol like IPX.
Bluetooth tried to define everything from the the RF communications all the way up to the application layer. The specification mentions how to the PIN code request should be presented to the user when authorizing a new connection. It also mentions which audio codecs should be supported for streaming audio. The BT profiles also tried to define how to transfer files, business cards or print documents.
These detailed application layer specifications simply don't exist in something like Ethernet. There might be an argument that BT tried to over specify things but it was attempting to give a level of interoperability which we still struggle to achieve over other networks.