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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

#321

Post by unethical_ban »

Paul_S wrote: post #56

Let me pass on to you some ancient Chinese... er, German engineering wisdom: He who understands wireless communication uses cables.

I thought android auto was going to be cool. I've gotten to use it with my flagship phones and several late model rentals. Every single time, it will disconnect upon occasion while driving (and using nav) forcing me to unplug replug. I haven't waited long enough to see if it could recover ina minute or so.

When I enable it by plugging my phone into the car, it tells me it is going to enable Bluetooth.

That is like getting high speed internet only to have the modem do dialup.

Does anyone know why a forced wired protocol requires substandard wireless connectivity?

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

#322

Post by asdf98 »

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…

My car does this too when I plug my phone into USB, it starts playing the first song alphabetically no matter what. I became so sick of this I just have a long empty track with tildes in the name in my library. I would assume bluetooth would do the same but my car's bluetooth has been off since it came out of the facotory and I will never turn it on.

Another obnoxious design is if i want to start a playlist I can't just start playing it - It gives me the playlist sorted alphatically. Once i start playing a track it then sorts them by playlist order. Literally the point of a playlist is the order which you choose your songs to be in. Same solution works, put a short empty file with a tilde, 0 or underscore. So when I pick a playlist I just have to press enter twice and not deal with the alphabetically sorted list.

This trick also works when i try to navigate with google maps and my phone is plugged into usb. I wont get the navigation voice if a music track is NOT playing - again I go to my silent track and play it in order to get the navigation voice when my phone plugged into USB

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

#323

Post by buran77 »

NikolaNovak wrote: post #190
causi wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's patently ridiculous how much better the microphone on $15 wired headphones is than the ones on a $50 set of wireless earbuds.

A 25 dollar logitech wired headset with a boom is brilliant. I have people with $200+ airpods on the call and I hear their cat dog air conditioner wind spouse keyboard car and everything. But they cannot be told this - they have expensive earbuds and they can hear ME fine, so it's all great!

But you're starting with the wrong assumption: that people focus on having the best option in each situation. The people buying Airpods probably know they're not the best headphones or microphone. They are the best jack of all trades even if master of none. They are the best package. And you rarely choose what's best for others, others probably do the same.

So when you WhatsApp from your mobile someone else has to see you type slowly, full of autocorrect errors and typos. You don't switch to the web Whatsapp from a computer, or a model M attached to the phone despite knowing they are faster because you get their messages fast and correct so it's all great.

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

#324

Post by commandlinefan »

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 shows me a couple of half-naked shaved guys hugging each other

Well, since nobody has ever read the spec in its entirety, it's completely possible that those guys are actually part of the specification, somewhere around page 5000 or so.

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

#325

Post by Der_Einzige »

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…

This is a weird one. I also have a Lexus, but from the year before they put carplay in. I did an aftermarket carplay upgrade, and I've never had any sort of issue like this with Bluetooth on my wife's iphone before...

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

#326

Post by toxik »

My main problem with Bluetooth is connecting and disconnecting devices together.

Want to use your corded headphones on your phone? Just plug them in. Want to switch to your computer? Just plug them in there.

Want to use your Bluetooth headphones with your computer? Turn them on. Check what they automatically connected to if anything. If wrong, find that device, disconnect Bluetooth, go back to computer, find device in Bluetooth menu somewhere and connect. Pray that the device doesn’t require you to enter discovery mode. Repeat the process for switching. Bonus points if your smartwatch was involved.

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

#327

Post by _fat_santa »

askvictor wrote: post #191
NikolaNovak wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sadly, apple started a 3.5mm free future and others were happy to jump on that horrible wagon (as well as soapbar sexy designs which you cannot hold without a case, but that's another lovable rant :). But yeah. My computers have Ethernet whenever they can. That alone saves what little hair I have left.

Maybe Apple had a sinister plan here... First, they make all of their own Apple gear's bluetooth work really well with other Apple gear (which they generally do). Then get rid of the cables, and everyone else will copy Apple because that seems to be what other companies do. But everyone else's bluetooth implementations suck (which they generally do), so people think that Android/Samsung/etc aren't as good as Apple wh…

I'm honestly shocked how good of a job Apple did on their AirPods. When they first came out I thought it was an expensive gimmick, but when they released the Pro's I bought in and they became my favorite Apple product of all time.

At least for me, the reliability of the connection as well as being able to do a quick "handoff" from my iPhone to my Mac to take a call is a gamechanger. Also the spacial audio feature is probably one of the best overlooked features of the AirPods, the depth of sound you get with it enabled is truly incredible given what you are listening on. When I discovered that feature I pretty much re-listened to my entire Spotify library, listening to songs I've heard hundreds of times before, I picked up sounds I never heard previously.

For $200, what a freaking package.

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

#328

Post by asdf98 »

wollsmoth wrote: post #319
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. In a ford I think it just continues playing whatever the last played song was. I also put songs on my iphone instead of using apple music, so I suppose it could be an issue with that service although idk why it would behave way differently from playing local files.

Only in fords with sync 3 or later. sync 2 is garbage

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

#329

Post by 0xbadcafebee »

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…

That sucks. For what it's worth, "old-school" Toyota headunits with Bluetooth seem to work quite well (for Bluetooth). The ones that came with graphics/more complex CPUs seem to have gone downhill.

You can try to install an older model OEM headunit in your car to see if that fixes your Bluetooth. Certain models had really decent sound, are cheap when found used online, and should have the same connectors in the back (depending on speaker options). Here's an example of replacing your headunit: https://thetrackahead.com/projects/2003-toyota-4runner/the-u...

Also, I think Auto-play is a setting in the headunit, in mine anyway. If not, your phone may have a setting for it.

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

#330

Post by dghlsakjg »

pas wrote: post #206
Certhas wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fe…

Logitech bluetooth wireless and apple airpods specifically. Logitech over their own wireless protocol, or any other set of wireless headphones is fine.

I have three sets of bluetooth headphones that I use on a rotating basis daily with my logitech bluetooth mouse and keyboard, and they are all dead reliable... well dead reliable for bluetooth devices

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