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Bluetooth remains an 'unusually painful' technology after two decades

cnn.com

361–370 of 599 posts

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

#361
post #258

Last time I checked the Bluetooth and BLE specs were massive documents. That's always a red flag for me. Low level tech like this should be clear, simple, concise and unambiguous. You can add complexity to the layers on top, if you must, if your application demands it. But as it stands the designers of the spec let the complexity escape everywhere.

I worked for a company developing 802.15.3 over a decade ago. It gave me some insight into how these specs are developed. It's a complete shit-show. The company would pay non-technical folks, like relatives of employees or whatever, to attend IEEE meetings so they'd have more votes to skew the process. Technical merits have little to do with what ends up in the spec.

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

#362

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's an iPhone problem. All our Androids (OnePlus, Google, Samsung, LG) have been connecting perfectly well to my TomTom navigator. Only my iPhone Xs refuses to connect. It's a well documented problem with iPhones and TomTom for many years. Similar story with my AirPods which won't connect to my Thinkpad running Linux - while all other BT headphones (Bose, Sony, Anker) do connect. Also the article seems to primaril…

My iPhone doesn't have these problems with my nearly-a-decade-old Honda Odyssey's BT stereo system. Neither does my wife's iPhone, nor the couple others we've owned while owning this van. That thing (the stereo / "smart" entertainment system) has got plenty of "how the shit did this pass QC?" quirks, but none relating to its interaction with my phone.

It's the car's fault.

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

#363

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…

Apple has done this for years and my take is they are tying to increase usage and relevance of Apple Music.

For example I only use Spotify in my car but it will not connect correctly unless I download and have Apple Music installed.

Just bad move by apple in my opinion. Just connect by bluetooth and let me use any app want.

Super dumb that you have to put a song labeled A in your song library that is just silence to get around this.

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

#364
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…

BT device makers are also coming in a slightly less explored field and have to make UX decisions that might not have clear answers yet.

For instance some BT headset have only a few buttons, and the play/pause button does also redial the last connected phone number depending on the phone’s state. I’m sure someone thought this feature made a ton of sense and really helps them in their day to day life, while I hate with the heat of a thousand suns.

I’d expect it takes us a few more years to come to a consensus on how to cleanly solve this kind of diverging views.

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

#365
post #340
post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Similar thing would happen in my Toyota, the song 'Afraid' by Yellowcard would play every time I turned on the car. Realized it was playing the first song in my library. In Apple Music there is a song called 'A a a a a Very Good Song (Silent Track)' by artist Samir Mezrahi, that contains 10 minutes of silence. I added that to my library and now that song plays when I turn on my car (although this autoplay only happen…

But why the hell is it autoplaying in the first place? Does apple really hate their customers/users so much that they can't make this an option? That's completely insane. The more I learn about apple, the more I see extremely hostile UI decisions for literally no reason

i seem to recall that this is what the spec calls for, and toyota follows the spec. it drives me up the wall.

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

#366
post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Similar thing would happen in my Toyota, the song 'Afraid' by Yellowcard would play every time I turned on the car. Realized it was playing the first song in my library. In Apple Music there is a song called 'A a a a a Very Good Song (Silent Track)' by artist Samir Mezrahi, that contains 10 minutes of silence. I added that to my library and now that song plays when I turn on my car (although this autoplay only happen…

I had a Mercedes lease for three years with the same problem of automatically playing the first song as sorted alphabetically. In my case, it was "A Boy Named Sue" by Johnny Cash. That song loses its humor after you hear it a few hundred times.

Same thing with my husband's car, his phone, and the song "A-Punk" by Vampire Weekend. I now jokingly play it as the first song any time we head off on a long road trip, much to his immense frustration.

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

#367
post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Thankfully that EU initiative failed. They wanted the industry to adopt micro-usb as the standard, which would have sucked and would be worse than the situation today

The EU charger mandate required USB if USB was sufficient, IIRC apple managed to continue using lightning connectors b arguing that USB standards of the time where not enough for the iPhone.

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

#368
post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looks like that might be retired going by https://discussions.apple.com/thread/251184844 > Customers are no longer able to remove the album on their own. You will need to reach out to Apple Support directly to have the album removed

I guess this is the essence, of why I never wanted an apple device. And I bookmark this comment, in case I forget .. I would need to ask my apple masters, if they please remove U2 from my device? No thank you.

I remember raging about this back when it happened and my coworkers couldn't understand why I just wouldn't like a free album, and am I bothered by two half-naked men embracing each other?

Boulder people are strange.

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

#369

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…

The first song in my library was a song by Killswitch Engage. A very loud song with lots of screaming. Ultimately I deleted the Music app from my iPhone to solve the auto play problem. I used Spotify for music at the time (now VLC). Deleting the app to solve the problem definitely feels like an extreme solution to a problem which shouldn’t be a problem at all!

But I have worse Bluetooth problems. My favorite Bluetooth headphones never want to connect the first few times. Trying to connect in this error state turns them off, for some reason. So I have this horrible dance where I turn them on and attempt to connect. My connecting device spins for a while. The headphones have silently turned off. I turn them back in and repeat. After about four times, they will usually connect. But sometimes I have to delete the connection and re-pair. Sometimes I have to turn off Bluetooth on other nearby devices to get it to work. And sometimes when connected, even near my source, the connection just goes silent.

I wish Bluetooth could behave a bit more like FM radio. A source is streaming out audio and my headphones can tune to that secure channel and get the stream. Headphones can tune between channels easily. This would solve my connection woes.

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

#370
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And Microsoft. And Google. According to the parent.

Well, fortunately these are not the only companies in the world. I have always had only great experience with Sony and Samsung Bluetooth devices (phones, headsets, other hardware).

My $350 sony headphones regularly have trouble connecting to my macbook. While speaking, about once every 10 hours of use, I sound like a robot and have to power cycle them to make the mic work correctly.

If they're connected to my android phone while also connected to any other device (dual connection is a feature they tout), they play a tick sound every minute like a terrible metronome.

I'm incredibly sympathetic to Apple deciding everything about bluetooth is hot garbage and building an alternative for audio.

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