Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Bluetooth remains an 'unusually painful' technology after two decades

cnn.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

481–490 of 599 posts

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

#481

Post by deepsun »

fleddr wrote: post #313

Bluetooth is absolute garbage, I hate it with a passion even if overall it works in 90% of cases. Just the other day I was connecting my phone to a mobile speaker in the garden. The phone is an inch away from it. Still doesn't connect, just a spinner that times out after a minute with "connection failed". Why does it fail? Who knows. It might work tomorrow. Or on another phone. Or when the weather is different. What…

Often it's a problem with firmware/driver implementation in one of those devices (like speaker), resulting from poor development processes.

Complexity of Bluetooth protocol, multiplied by the speaker price (assuming you have not the really expensive ones) does not help as well.

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

#482

Post by thedrbrian »

CharlesW wrote: post #276
seer wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> …since I'm an Apple Music user, whenever I start the car, it just defaults to whatever's I've been listening to there… […] Now why apple just defaults to Apple Music, and not "your music player of choice a.k.a. Spotify" is questionable… As you noted, it continues playing whatever you were playing in whatever app you were using, with no preference for Apple Music (I'm also a Music subscriber). If you were playing so…

you can set up shortcuts to automatically start playing something. I've got one that changes to music and maxes the audio volume when it connects to my car.

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

#483

Post by deepsun »

jkaptur wrote: post #331
fleddr wrote: post #313

Bluetooth is absolute garbage, I hate it with a passion even if overall it works in 90% of cases. Just the other day I was connecting my phone to a mobile speaker in the garden. The phone is an inch away from it. Still doesn't connect, just a spinner that times out after a minute with "connection failed". Why does it fail? Who knows. It might work tomorrow. Or on another phone. Or when the weather is different. What…

I feel the same way - it's so interesting how the lack of a mental model causes such frustration! There's perfectly well-understood metaphors for network availability ("how many bars" and so on). I wonder why Bluetooth doesn't use them or create its own, and instead just fails to work .

> perfectly well-understood metaphors for network availability ("how many bars" ...

ACKHSHUALLY, "how many bars" is well known to be very bad indication of network connectivity. Yes, if you have one bar it's probably worse than five, but for example "my phone show five bars and yours only three" is very wrong way to judge -- there's no relative measure.

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

#484

Post by faebi »

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 nearly as good as my story. I‘m walking with airpods past my car. The car detects my keys and turns on bluetooth, iPhone connects and thinks it's better to send audio to my car instead of the airpods in my ears. A long and painful connection loss is the result while I walk away and hope that my airpods reconnect. There is no way to set a presedence or similar. These days it‘s even better, the iPhone also switches to car mode and forces me to disable it first.

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

#485

Post by flanbiscuit »

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…

Can you turn BT off and connect via a chord?

That's what I do with my car. Sure it's a little annoying to use a chord rather than using BT but at least you wouldn't have it auto-playing when you start the car.

I have an Android and when we had the BT on the radio on, it would auto-connect to my phone and start playing whatever the last thing I was listening to on Spotify. If I stopped Spotify, my phone's audio output would still remain connected to the radio, even if my gf was connected with her iPhone and the system had switched to iOS CarPlay (the radio had both Android Auto and iOS CarPlay)

We finally figured out we could disable BT via the radio's setting and that solved our problem. We actually prefer connecting via a cable anyways.

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

#486

Post by matt_heimer »

Found out recently that Samsung Buds automatically go into pairing mode when you open their case which you do often because they charge in it. There is no way to prevent the behavior. So every time you go to use them all the nearby Windows computers prompt if you'd like to pair them and if you take them out of their case in public there is no way to prevent other people from pairing with them and playing whatever they want. Both the Buds 2 and Buds Pro are like this.

Also have some JayBirds and Bose Sport headphones in a similar form factor and thankfully you have to press a button on them to enter pairing mode.

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

#487

Post by Izkata »

2-718-281-828 wrote: post #212
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'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…

It's possible it's neither:

> but what I know is that I really fucking hate U2.

Back around 2010/2011, AT&T pushed a U2 album to Android phones in an OTA update as a system install, it couldn't be deleted.

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

#488

Post by Consultant32452 »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #398
blackhaz wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also have an alarm set up I cannot delete. It says "pick up Matt from school." It migrated all the way from iPhone 7 to this X. But he has grown up since and I don't need to pick him up anymore. I'll include this in my request.

There is a "Free Airport Wifi" WAP saved on my phone from Mexico City since my iPhone 6. It is long deleted, but it has migrated through the years to my current iPhone 13. Its residue is left on my phone in only this way: Whenever I connect to a new wifi point, after typing in the password, my phone will say it cannot connect to "Free Airport Wifi". I have to type the password in again (usually one someone just read…

I have a similar phenomenon with an exchange account. It's connected to Outlook and everything is working. But sometimes my iPhone X randomly asks me for credentials, doesn't let me input credentials, and then goes away and everything keeps working.

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

#489

Post by adhesive_wombat »

aliqot wrote: post #183
ricardobayes wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I sometimes wonder what the world would be like without FAANG. I'm lead to believe the world would be a better place if all companies would have a max company size of Bose, or Sennheiser. Then no stupid decisions could be pushed through by force, like the removal of the 3.5 mm jack. If the market really wants it, they will eventually vote with their wallet. Same goes with social media, fb killed off local country-spe…

The market wants what the other segment of the market has, that's the purpose of marketing. Phones with no jacks, like laptops with no i/o, is something impractical that people self-justify because of the logo and the clout it affords. You're part of the in group, you made it, you have achieved sameness, you have an iPhone . Airpods are just about the worst headphones money can buy and people fight over them, despite…

> you have achieved sameness, you have an iPhone.

You mean "....you have iPhone". Gotta get the weird marketing right if you want to be in the club.

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

#490

Post by conductr »

nobleach wrote: post #345
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…

Oh my gosh, I didn't know where this was going with the half-naked shaved guys until you said, "Songs of Innocence"... and immediately it became a shared experience. If I could somehow tell my phone, "NEVER play Apple Music, always defer to Spotify if you have to auto-play anything", I'd do it in a heartbeat.

This is the real issue. Apple Music being a firm default. The U2 thing can be deleted from Apple Music. It exists because it was released that way a decade or so ago. It got pushed into everyone’s playlist as a purchased album, but can be deleted. I have no music at all in Apple Music for this reason. I prefer silence over this.

My problem is that I have to turn off BT on my phone for various reasons. Yet, no matter what, when I start my car it turns back on my phones BT setting and reconnects. (Eg. If my wife is playing her phone, then we stop for an errand, and get back in it always goes back to my phone.)

Post reply on HN