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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

#491

Post by Groxx »

vladvasiliu wrote: post #60
Groxx wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've had pretty good luck with phones and most things (audio has various codec mismatches if you're going for high quality, but that's all at least visible on boxes), but not computers and [nearly anything except HID]. HID works great everywhere, and battery life is amazing , I love bluetooth for HID. Bluetooth headsets and computers seems like a special kind of flaky-hell. I tried ~8 modern high-end headsets on 4 la…

That's weird. I've had pretty much the reverse experience. My Sony and Shure headphones have always worked perfectly (even on Linux!), but I've had issues with a keyboard and mouse not reconnecting after they went to sleep (computer stayed fully on), or at least taking forever. However, I was surprised by how little lag the mouse had compared to its regular wireless (Logitech unifying).

I wonder if it's due to trying to use the newer Bluetooth profiles? Which of course OSX and Windows don't let you select, nor do the vast majority of headsets.

Every headset I've used with SBC selected has worked perfectly, including some ancient cheap ones, and I'm pretty sure that's how things are connecting to my car (which always works).

---

For mice, I dunno. I've had consistently good results, and I primarily use logitechs. My wife recently swapped out an ancient one that worked perfectly with a AA that lasted 3+ months for a modern one that... also works perfectly with an AA that lasts for 1-3 months. Similar results for keyboards, I primarily use a chonky wired one and I can't feel any difference when I use bluetooth ones.

If I did feel lag, it'd be an weird and I'd probably immediately return it. So I do tend to stick with one for a long time, and haven't tried many.

I've never done objective latency tests, but they feel fine to me. No noticeable lag compared to wired, which is plenty good for me. RF dongles do at least make pairing a non-issue though, just plug and go (which I LOVE about Apple laptops + keyboard/trackpad, plugging it in sets up the bluetooth pairing).

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

#493

Post by Groxx »

Nuthen wrote: post #385
rvnx wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you, I have the XM3 so somehow now I know that it's possible.

Have the XM3 as well but I use Windows. This is an annoying issue with current Bluetooth headphones. Basically your choice is high quality audio but no microphone, or low quality audio with microphone. When you have the headphones connected it should offer 2 different sound outputs. One for stereo and one for hands free audio. If the stereo output is active then the microphone won't work at all. Edit: Here's a post t…

For those with bluetooth woes:

I've had better luck in all operating systems with a stand-alone USB bluetooth audio dongle: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B089PYFLBN

It's not perfect, but the combination of "you can select the codec" and "the bluetooth stack is 100% out of the hands of the OS" gave me dramatically better results on almost every headset I tried.

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

#494

Post by Groxx »

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.

Particularly with watches! So many of them are hot garbage at connectivity.

I miss my Pebble :( Though the Bangle.js and other "just uses bluetooth LE" devices have been essentially perfect connectivity as well. LE seems pretty reliable.

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

#495

Post by edgyquant »

dhimes wrote: post #288
jefe_ wrote: 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…

My Toyota only plays my iPhone bluetooth if (a) my car is in bluetooth "mode" and not radio and (b) I have my music app open. I've never experienced what you (two) describe. 2020 Toy and iPhone 11.

I have a 2017 Toyota and never has that problem. Though for awhile I did have an issue where audible kept starting randomly but it seems to have fixed itself.

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

#496

Post by olyjohn »

nucleardog wrote: post #344
treeman79 wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would love if CarPlay would just work constantly. On my Ford remote start results in it not working 50% of the time. Regular start fails 10% of the time. Solution is turn car off for 10 minutes or so. I assume some capacitor has to drain fully. This is apparently just a known bug.

Not quite as bad, but my Subaru is similar. If I'm in the car with my phone when it turns on it connects immediately almost every time. If I remote start the car and then go out to it it probably connects about 1/5 times. Another 1/5 I can go into the bluetooth settings and manually initiate the connection and it'll work. But a full 60% of the time I have to turn the entire car off and on again for the bluetooth to f…

My mom's Subaru... has that god awful 15 inch monitor in the middle of the dash. Every time a phone call comes in, the music starts playing WHILE ON THE PHONE CALL.

And I thought, wow, this huge-ass monitor will be awesome for Android Auto and CarPlay. NOPE, only like 1/3 of the screen gets used for CarPlay. This little tiny 7 inch section of the screen. Total joke these infotainment systems are. Give me back my goddamn double-din hole in the dashboard!

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

#497

Post by caleb-allen »

deepsun wrote: post #483
jkaptur wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's true, but at least the mental model roughly holds. Somebody who is barely technologically literate will understand that "more bars" is better, and that's exactly what the abstraction should do. Communicate something simply at the cost of precision.

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

#498

Post by epx »

Zigbee failed in a similar way, didn't it? An exceptionally complex protocol (for the intended usage) that left out a major interoperability aspect: the pairing phase. (BT fixed this partially by adding Secure Simple Pairing.)

Wireless protocols are inherently more complex, there are crappy Wi-Fi hardware out there, too.

BT and Zigbee have one additional disavantage over Wi-Fi: they are slow, so they are more heavily affected by packet loss and interference in ISM band. This probably lead to more complex protocols, you cannot do things TCP/IP-simple if you don't have bandwidth to spare in order to retransmit losses.

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

#499

Post by lostlogin »

mandmandam wrote: post #474
crubier wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's literally what the parent comment is describing

It bears repeating. I've tried to remove that f*cking album from my library so many times, on so many devices. It's effectively unkillable; and I'm no stranger to computers. Why that tax-dodging blowhard felt he had the right to squeeze his turd of an album onto each and every apple product I buy for, presumably, the rest of my life is unfathomable.

It’s really weird how much love Apple has for U2. That whole episode was just so cringe and tone deaf. Knowing the internal politics around it would be fascinating as surely someone tried to stop it.

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

#500

Post by lattalayta »

nostromo wrote: post #456
jefe_ wrote: 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 wonder how much this person makes in royalties for a silent track.

Was (and maybe still is?) top of the charts

https://www.engadget.com/2017-08-10-silent-10-minute-song-it...

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