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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

#121

Post by DavidPeiffer »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #103
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…

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

I've never dealt with Bluetooth myself, but once heard/read that a company could follow that spec perfectly and their device wouldn't work with large swaths of devices. The claim was that companies implement something that's Bluetooth adjacent but there are some non-conformances that everybody "just does" to make it work the majority of the time.

I'm curious if your (and others) experience align with this?

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

#122

Post by sgt »

bluescrn wrote: post #97
sgt wrote: post #6

My AirPods Pro are likely the only Bluetooth device I've seen that's not only easy to pair but also works every time without fail. The other day they actually did fail though, but that was because of massive interference of 2.4GHz that made nothing work. Can't really blame Bluetooth for that.

Good hardware ruined by non-replaceable batteries

Lithium-ion, should last a long time

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

#123

Post by saiya-jin »

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…

what the hell did I just read... but yes Apple's implementation of Bluetooth is quite subpar compared to most peers, even though not sure if Lexus is 100% innocent here

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

#124

Post by moonchrome »

jacquesm wrote: post #69
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…

> It's like phone chargers before USB. No, it's like phone chargers before EU regulators stepped in.

>No, it's like phone chargers before EU regulators stepped in.

When did this happen ?

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

#125

Post by ChuckNorris89 »

michaelt wrote: post #105
ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sorry but you completely misunderstood my argument. In this example you are not the customer of the hammer, as you're not the one buying the Bluetooth chips and SW/FW for them, but the phone/widget manufacturer is buying the hammer(chips) and he's responsible for using it correctly (FW and antenna design) to build a product where Bluetooth works well.

But like I said in the comment above, if the phone/widget manufacturer fucks up the Bluetooth implementation (misuses the hammer) because they cheap out and buy the cheapest no-name Bluetooth chips they can find on the market instead of buying from established companies, and then farm out the FW and antenna design to the cheapest sweatshop in Shenzhen, Bangalore or Eastern Europe since cost cutting and crunch in the consumer hardware industry is rampant and everything gets nickel and dimed to fractions of a cent while being rushed out the door to meet Christmas sales season or some other arbitrary product release deadline, then the phone/widget manufacturer who sold you the device is to blame for the rushed and buggy implementation, not Bluetooth itself.

So to conclude, if your bluetooth phone and watch are buggy, then blame their manufacturers for improper Bluetooth implementation and validation and ask for fixes/replacements/refunds, as a correct Bluetooth implementation is possible to do if you hire skilled engineers ($$$) and give them time to perform validation tests (more $$$), but instead, most of the widget manufacturers(including car companies) cheap out, like I said before, and cut dozens of corners to get their product out the door quickly and cheaply so they can skim more of the profits.

I hope it's clear now.

Source: Former FW engineer for Bluetooth widgets

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

#126

Post by detaro »

moonchrome wrote: post #124
jacquesm wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's like phone chargers before USB. No, it's like phone chargers before EU regulators stepped in.

>No, it's like phone chargers before EU regulators stepped in. When did this happen ?

2009

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

#127

Post by RedShift1 »

grnmamba wrote: post #72
jacquesm wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's like phone chargers before USB. No, it's like phone chargers before EU regulators stepped in.

Everyone except Apple was already on USB. And even in the pre-smartphone days, phone chargers always worked reliably. Phone charging is and was the complete opposite of what bluetooth is today.

> Everyone except Apple was already on USB.

My old box of chargers begs to differ

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

#128

Post by iasay »

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…

It's definitely a Lexus problem. The BT connection on my Citroen is absolutely 100% flawless. Works every time reliably. But it's literally just a dumb audio and telephony connection. Anything more complicated than that is guaranteed to be absolutely a universally huge fucking shit show.

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

#130

Post by iasay »

BT was actually fucking with me badly. I have a Sony soundbar and someone was connecting to it periodically and playing music really loud at 2AM. I had the BT mode on it turned off and the discovery stuff turned off. But still getting connections.

Got fed up with it, opened it up and cut the BT antenna foil off the board in the end. Silence is bliss.

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