I had started to like my bluetooth headset, but then one day it stopped working during a presentation. Never again.
Bluetooth remains an 'unusually painful' technology after two decades
201–210 of 599 posts
Re: Bluetooth remains an 'unusually painful' technology after two decades
#202Earlier quoted context omitted.
For what is worth, the same is for android. Whoever thought that changing volume should trigger "play" didn't actually test it. I thought Audible was a virus, I can't shut it down or stop it and whatever I do, it starts playing
That’s not actually Android, or iOS. It’s the car audio system sending the Play command.
Oh I see, that's terrible
Re: Bluetooth remains an 'unusually painful' technology after two decades
#203As someone who worked on Bluetooth in consumer electronics for years the title gave me a good laugh.
Re: Bluetooth remains an 'unusually painful' technology after two decades
#204Earlier quoted context omitted.
Bose and improved sound quality in one sentence?
Like it or not, we aren't talking hifi and you may not love their specific coloration but the audio quality per form factor and price of bose bluetooth speakers is quite great compared to alternatives. I mean there are certainly better ones obviously but my soundlink revolve and my soundlink micro are much better than the models from other brands they replaced. Reliability however may be a different thing but I have…
In my opinion Bose performs only slightly better than the cheapest crap and only has a moderately better build quality, yet at a (near) premium price range. I think their products are barely worth half the money they ask for it.
But this is my opinion on Bose in general and not this specific product range. Personally I cant stand Bluetooth audio for anything else but background noise. I'm still amazed how a 192kbs mp3 can sound better with 5 euro earplugs compared to a 200+ euro Bluetooth headset with aptX support.
Eventually it doesn't matter at all, if you are happy with their product(s) and consider it money well spend, then who am I to judge.
Edit:
amiga-workbench 51 minutes ago
The most grating "feature" of Bluetooth is having headphones that support fancy AAC/AptX codecs, but as soon as you want to make use of its microphone it dumps the connection right back to A2DP.
I'm no longer amazed.
Re: Bluetooth remains an 'unusually painful' technology after two decades
#205My 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…
The general idea I think is that once you start the car, it just send a play command the moment it detects the connection. And in theory it _can_ provide a really nice experience. For example I'm walking to my car listening to an audio book, the moment I start the car, BT is connecting to the phone and moves the audio playback from my AirPods to my car speaker without skipping a beat, its really impressive. Additiona…
My car (mazda 3) does this where it just sends the play command as soon as the phone (pixel) connects. But it just continues playing whatever I was last listening to, so it's always something different. Kinda nice.
Re: Bluetooth remains an 'unusually painful' technology after two decades
#206Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It's like phone chargers before USB. No, it's like phone chargers before EU regulators stepped in.
That was my first association as well. This seems like a much much harder thing to regulate though... For USB chargers industry had come up with a good solution but market failure meant there was no incentive to adopt it. That's text book regulation stuff. Here there doesn't seem to be a good proven solution out there that you could mandate...
there's no need to mandate it, but the EU could spend a few ebucks on consumer appliances interoperability testing, and simply shaming those that suck. (or at least put out a statement about the problem, which could be simply lack of incentives for cooperation on solving the issues. or maybe too much backward compatibility preventing the whole ecosystem to move to more robust BT standards, etc.)
for example just a few days (week) ago there was a thread about how Logitech wireless stuff and wireless headphones interfere.
sure, it's hard to point to a singular root cause (Logitech emits too much, or headphones are ill-designed and BT is simply not the right tool for this because this or that)
but there are clear software (firmware, drivers, kernel) failures, that stem from simply releasing absolute garbage. (and every layer just coding for the happy path.)
Re: Bluetooth remains an 'unusually painful' technology after two decades
#207If I can add few cents to the discussion. Bluetooth remains an 'unusually painful' technology for us, because: - There is no decent support on web so we need to rely on the mercy of Apple/iOS (RIP to Web Bluetooth API). - Some Android devices don't work well with Bluetooth (e.g. Motorola, OnePlus). Data packages are gibberish, connectivity is lost on random occasions, etc. And from customer perspective: device manufa…
I dare you to try sending anything between an Apple device and ANY Android phone.
In my experience, the Android phones work between each other, and the iPhones work between each other, but I can't cross the Apple fence.
Something tells me this is on purpose.
Re: Bluetooth remains an 'unusually painful' technology after two decades
#208My 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…
I have an iPhone SE (1st gen) and a 50 dollar bluetooth enabled radio in my car. It works flawlessly every time, I turn on ignition, the radio connects with my phone and I can hit play. When I turn off ignition the current song is paused and the radio disconnects.
Re: Bluetooth remains an 'unusually painful' technology after two decades
#209I've always had this hunch that the Bluetooth protocol is somewhat underspecified - if you just implement the spec, you're going to have something that mostly works in the happy case, but you gotta do a bunch more to make it work consistently under less-than-ideal real world conditions (which companies like Jabra and Apple then tend to do). Any hardware people wanna chime in and tell me if I'm close or not?
You're not. When something in bt doesn't work it's caused by two things: a regular bug in the stack, or a feature of the spec that was implemented incorrectly which comes from ambiguous wording in the spec or simply the fact that it's several thousand pages long. This is usually not a problem if you have two devices using the same stack talking to each other but normally that's not the case.
100%. Interoperability is the complexity. You’ll find old popular devices for example that are slightly different in behavior to the “norm”. It could be straight up incorrect behavior or maybe something more subtle. Do you drop support for those devices or change your behavior dynamically based on the device? Would your customers complain if you did drop it? Can you identify the device reliably? What if they update their software/behavior in the future - would your workaround break? Does your BT software stack even give you enough control to do fix it? Does your hardware/software vendor give you enough support to fix things if you can’t do it yourself? How many other devices did you test against?
It was painful but fun to work on.
Re: Bluetooth remains an 'unusually painful' technology after two decades
#210Earlier quoted context omitted.
Any high power 2.4ghz transmitter will destroy Bluetooth communication, this is all in the same 2.45ghz ISM band. I guess they use some devices communicating on that band.
They certainly do - walkie-talkies! Edit: Yes, they do exist - you can google this. But on reflection, a commenter below is probably right that it's more likely wireless security cameras, given typical site requirements (range, penetration depth)
Handhelds are usually UHF - in the 446MHz range. Do you know of personal radios that operate in the 2.4GHz unlicensed spectrum?