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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

#531

Post by cryptonector »

conductr wrote: post #490
nobleach wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's why I have NO music on iTunes.

Did you hear that, Apple? I will never give you money for music, ever ever, as long as connecting to a car == play iTunes.

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

#532

Post by calt »

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…

I ended up uninstalling Apple Music because it would similarly play the same song (I forget what it was) at surprising times.

Spotify doesn't give me the same problem.

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

#533

Post by Robotbeat »

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…

I had to laugh so hard at this as I’m literally sitting in my Tesla listening to Songs of Innocence that autoplayed on my iPhone without my explicit consent for exactly the reason you mention. I swear I have Stockholm Syndrome because the album that Apple forced my to download is slowly growing on me.

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

#534

Post by calt »

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.

You can uninstall Apple Music. At least there's that saving grace.

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

#535

Post by qorrect »

caleb-allen wrote: post #497
deepsun wrote: post #483

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

We could have the segments of the ᛒ turn on or off based on signal strength

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

#536

Post by jgwil2 »

cptcobalt wrote: post #366
mcculley wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Haha, I can hum that opening riff instantaneously because it's the first song on my wife's phone. Do di do di do di do di do di do di. Bum, bum, bum bum bum bum!

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

#537

Post by t3e »

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…

We had the same problem in our 2016 Outback until the head unit died. The only thing we really miss about it is the backup camera; but we can live without that, and apparently the stereo, as a fair price for being free of bluetooth audio hell.

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

#538

Post by yalogin »

The user experience is also terrible. In all the Bluetooth enabled cars I saw, the audio starts playing the moment the phone connects to the car. There isn’t anyway to disable it. This is a problem for atleast 5-7yrs now. Even Tesla and apple couldn’t fix it

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

#539

Post by amluto »

yalogin wrote: post #538

The user experience is also terrible. In all the Bluetooth enabled cars I saw, the audio starts playing the moment the phone connects to the car. There isn’t anyway to disable it. This is a problem for atleast 5-7yrs now. Even Tesla and apple couldn’t fix it

I suspect this is a problem with the car: it connects and sends the command to play. But Tesla has a particularly poor implementation in which it will do this even if it’s not playing the Bluetooth stream — the phone would stream into the void and the car will play other music.

I don’t think this is Apple’s fault. Apple could add a per-peer setting to disable play commands over Bluetooth or maybe to disable them within a few seconds of connecting.

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

#540

Post by aljgz »

A lot of pain points in Bluetooth can be easily addressed by simple UX research: Phones and computers try to decide when to connect to a Bluetooth device. Just giving users an option like: "Connect to this device automatically" and unchecking it by default goes a long way.

I had a Bluetooth speaker. An unknown neighbour was connected to it and there was no way for me to use this speaker, remotely, until I moved to another place.

At night, I play sleep music on my Sonos wireless speaker. If I restart my Linux laptop, it connects to the speaker's Bluetooth interface, playing an annoying sound for my sleeping wife. I should remember to disconnect from it, or my music will be played to her.

If you have a Bluetooth speaker, every time you turn it on, you have to find the phone/laptop that has connected to it, disconnect, and then connect the one that you want to use at the moment.

Makes me wonder: do designers of these products use their products in any capacity?

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