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Origin of the Bluetooth Name
- u2077 5y agoRelevant Tom Scott video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VdmQp9M9jUo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VdmQp9M9jUo
- ybbond 5y agoI knew about this information from the same video. Great explanation from great channel (and person). The article is a nice source to read tho
- sackerhews 5y agoI really like Bluetooth. I just wish it would "just work". My bluetooth devices (high end) don't always connect properly and I have to disconnect them and reconnect them. It's a minor inconvenience I know, but after 23 years I'd have hoped that those oddities would have been rounded out.
- markpeppers 5y agoSomeone had to link this, guess I’ll go ahead. https://xkcd.com/2055/ https://xkcd.com/2055/
- wojciii 5y agoThis is so accurate. We have two cars. When my wife starts one of the cars the carkit connects to my phone and she spends 10 minutes with the engine running trying to get her phone to connect to the car. If I'm in a good mood I turn off Bluetooth on my phone to save her time.
- Kye 5y agoThis is evidence that Bluetooth is a mischievous entity. The range is terrible unless better range will cause problems.
- coldpie 5y agoI just use an aux cord into the headphone jack. Easy peasy.
- jandrese 5y agoFinding a phone with a headphone jack that isn't some low end garbage is becoming harder and harder each year.
- dmos62 5y agoI'm using a 200 eur Xiaomi Redmi with a 3.5mm jack and I'm very happy with it. Battery lasts me around 5 days. Why is it garbage?
- coldpie 5y agoIn truth, I use a USB-C/Lightning-to-3.5mm adapter. It lives on the car's aux cord.
- ghostly_s 5y agodoes someone sell one of these that survives more than 10 disconnect cycles now?
- coldpie 5y agoNo. I buy a new handful every couple months. It sucks. My latest batch is from some brand called Insignia and so far has lasted one month without issues, but I'll be surprised if they don't fail soon. Previously tried Apple and Anker, both failed in a small number of months. I've considered wrapping the thing in heat-shrink tubing to give it some rigidity and protect the nano-scale-wires they're using in there, but haven't got any handy. I'd love a phone with a real jack, but phones just aren't made for me anymore.
- Moru 5y agoJust buy a cheap phone with an audio jack and use that one dedicated for the car. No need for the latest greatest for playing music on the go...
- enobrev 5y agoReminds me of an issue I've been dealing with. The bluetooth in our car picks my wife's phone every time. Not a big deal, one might think, but then if I turn off bluetooth on her phone, it turns right back on and reconnects! I tried updating the car's settings not to prefer her phone (both were preferred), still a problem. I believe at some point when we got our new phones, she accepted a dialog that set the car to a "trusted device" which means it will automatically turn on bluetooth and connect as soon as it's in range. But I couldn't find a way to turn that setting off. Finally I had to force the car to forget both of our devices and I was able to get my phone to connect to the car while my wife was anywhere within a few feet of our garage.
- raisedbyninjas 5y agoJust a guess, but location services can use bluetooth scanning for getting a location fix even when bluetooth is off. Sometimes these pings will turn it back on. You might try disabling bluetooth location scanning.
- enobrev 5y agoMakes sense. Will try if we run into this again. Thanks!
- wildzzz 5y agoIn one of our cars, the car will just connect to whoever last was connected although sometimes this means it connects to someone's phone that isn't even in the car. The other car has a preference selection that will try the preferred phone first and then will try whoever else is in range. I like this one best since I'm usually alone in this car. Either option really doesn't work great if you are sharing the car, the car would never really know who it should connect to if both phones are in range. I wish the car would somehow factor in RSSI into the auto connect decision, like don't pick the default or most recent phone if it has significantly less signal strength than the other devices in range.
- enobrev 5y ago
- josefresco 5y agoThank you for sharing this insanity. I have the same situation, I sit in my driveway for 5 minutes while my slow-as-molasses car audio system disconnects from my wife's phone (inside house) and connects to mine (in my pocket) It actually works better if I just drive off. Once the BT is out of range, it autoconnects to my phone usually within 1/4 mile time.
- semi-extrinsic 5y agoI don't understand this insanity stuff. We have a $35 chinese brand (Ugreen FWIW) bluetooth adapter in our car. If it connects to my wife's phone when I go start the car (or opposite), all I have to do on Android is to pull down the notification drawer, long-press the bluetooth icon to open the bluetooth settings, then click the name of the desired device in the list that comes up. 10 seconds later it has connected correctly. This $35 dongle also has pause/play and skip buttons, and you can use those to answer calls as well. The buttons are tactile so you can use them without looking. Honestly, the only bad thing is the built-in microphone delivers pretty bad audio when you use it as a hands free. But for $35 I cannot complain.
- Moru 5y agoMy old car used to have a cable that was connected to an audio tape inserted in the radio. I just needed to connect my MP3-player to it and off I went. It just worked. No 10 seconds waiting for a connection or 10 minutes fiddling with options. Once I was hovering the car at the gas station and the cable went into the hose and broke off from the audio tape though so not everything old was better... :-)
- robotnikman 5y agoI had that problem with my old car which had an aftermarket radio with bluetooth. My current car has android auto which uses a USB cable to connect to my phone. Sure I have to use a cable now, but I deal with none of the hassles of bluetooth. I just plug it in and it works.
- throwaway984393 5y agoThose problems can be a real toothache.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- kuratkull 5y agoI though everyone (old enough) knew this already, it was a somewhat talked about thing when Bluetooth started getting adopted in consumer technology aeons ago
- sackerhews 5y agoYou weren't trying to make fun of people, but it's a good one: https://xkcd.com/1053/ https://xkcd.com/1053/
- sakex 5y agoFitting
- usrusr 5y ago“In 1996, three industry leaders, Intel, Ericsson, and Nokia, met“ So Nordicsemi really had nothing to do with it? The world felt more consistent before I read that sentence.
- HPsquared 5y agoAn interesting point about the logo, and a test of Unicode: "The Bluetooth logo is a bind rune merging the Younger Futhark runes (Hagall) (ᚼ) and (Bjarkan) (ᛒ), Harald’s initials."
- martin_a 5y agoHN has passed the Unicode test.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- tasha0663 5y agoWhen the alien archaeologists dig up our civilization, they'll think we were still putting magic runes on everything.
- jaggederest 5y agoIf you don't think Bluetooth is nigh unto magic, what is? Imagine explaining it to someone from even 30 years ago.
- HPsquared 5y agoComputer programming in general is akin to magic. It's literally in the realm of "say the magic words in the correct order, and things will happen".
- azinman2 5y agoI’m actually surprised there wasn’t similar wireless headphones previously that were just pure analog FM radio. Seems very doable with older technology, save battery size/weight.
- ChrisClark 5y agoThere definitely was. You could get them for your home stereo, not phones.
- dybber 5y agoHarald Bluetooth built some amazing fortifications for his period of time: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viking_ring_fortress https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viking_ring_fortress https://www.researchgate.net/publication/263286349_A_Palisade_Fit_for_a_King_Ideal_Architecture_in_King_Harald_Bluetooth's_Jelling https://www.researchgate.net/publication/263286349_A_Palisad...
- behnamoh 5y agoI still wonder why Apple has not dropped Bluetooth already. Bluetooth sucks, period. It helped shape many creative ideas, but it cannot meet the expectations in 2022 anymore. Bluetooth was, and still is, the most widely used means of file sharing, esp. between Android devices. When Apple decided not to support file sharing over Bluetooth in iOS, that was a good decision, albeit being an inconvenience to users. But Apple then introduced AirDrop which work’s way better than Bluetooth. Meanwhile, there’s still no reliable way to wirelessly transfer files between Android and Windows devices, and your have to use Bluetooth for that! Bluetooth also sucks when it comes to wireless headphones and other wireless accessories. I’m seriously surprised that Apple kept using Bluetooth for their AirPods.
- sillyquiet 5y agoFun fact, the very first explanation of Bluetooth tech I saw was by Leo Laporte on Tech TV sometime in the 90s. The name was the first thing they discussed iirc.
- silisili 5y agoWoulda been ZDTV in the 90s. Man I miss that channel. It all started going downhill after the first name change.
- sillyquiet 5y agoYeah, this would have been 98 - 99, so probably was zdtv at that point.
- danuker 5y agoFun fact: Apple and non-Apple devices won't share files via Bluetooth.
- sofixa 5y agoWhy? What's Apple's reasoning for that? Probably something along the lines of security or privacy but i really don't see it.
- InitialLastName 5y agoSame as Apple's reasoning for their other, er, opportunistic hesitance when it comes to interoperability: "Every time we add friction to the boundary of our ecosystem, it drives people to operate exclusively within our ecosystem". There's a reason people without iPhones show up a different color in iMessage too (and that group chats with Android users frequently don't function [carrier dependent]), and it has nothing to do with technical constraints.
- tomrod 5y agoReally?
- celsoazevedo 5y agoYep. It was already like this when I got an iPhone 5 and as far as I know it's still the same on the iPhone 13. While these days we have faster technologies, bluetooth is available on most devices. It's like SMS, but for file transfers. Another reason for me not to buy iPhones.
- errcorrectcode 5y agoFile sharing over BT is insecure, obsolete, and not widely-supported. It's better to deal with reality that BLE-capable apps and cloud apps are universal replacements.
- 5y ago
- danuker 5y agoI find Bluetooth impractical to use due to its slow speed and incompatibility between Android and Apple devices, as well as interference with Wi-Fi. Everyone I know shares files via a centralized service like WhatsApp, but those are getting iffy also. I share files locally through a hotspot and LWS: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/net.basov.lws.fdroid https://f-droid.org/en/packages/net.basov.lws.fdroid
- chakkepolja 5y ago> Everyone I know shares files via a centralized service like WhatsApp, but those are getting iffy also. Maybe you can convince them to use Files by Google, Trebleshot or something like that, which doesn't require internet. For desktop <-> mobile sharing, there's always KDE connect for Linux and Windows.
- giorgioz 5y agoI feel Bluetooth is the ever-unstable technology we have been beta testing for 2 decades. I own Quietbose QuietComfort 35 which I paid 350 USD. They are top of the line headphones and yet the bluetooth still sucks. This is not a blame on Quietbose which in fact might be one of the best product ever. After few months of use I just decided it's just less annoying to use them with the cable. BLUETOOTH STILL SUCKS!
- barbazoo 5y agoThat's one data point. I've been using my QC45 with a MBP and Android device and it works flawlessly. My hearing aid is connected to my Android via BLE and has worked consistently for which I'm really really grateful. I think it's a magnificent piece of technology.
- zwirbl 5y agoWith the new BLE audio standard, everything will get better™
- ChuckNorris89 5y agoWhat are you talking about? BLE is not an audio standard. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluetooth_Low_Energy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluetooth_Low_Energy
- stordoff 5y agoI assume they're referring to LE Audio. From Wikipedia: > Announced in January 2020, LE Audio will allow the protocol to carry sound and add features such as one set of headphones connecting to multiple audio sources or multiple headphones connecting to one source
- larschdk 5y agoNo, but a BLE extension for audio is being created.
- kalleboo 5y ago
- duffyjp 5y agoI had a bluetooth mouse and keyboard on my PowerBook G4 for two years before I even had wifi. It worked flawlessly. As soon as folks started adding wifi to their homes the mouse became unusable and the keyboard would occasionally miss keys. The modern solution of vendor specific dongles is more reliable, but I sure wish we didn't need them.
- johnwalkr 5y agoI never have issues with Bluetooth on my macs, but have endless hassles on windows. I thought it was kind of funny that all Logitech wireless stuff these days has a dongle, except those advertised as "for mac." Those have normal bluetooth.
- lhoff 5y agoI don't now mich about the evolution of Bluetooth over the years but I am using a modern Bluetooth mouse for 2-3 years now and never issues with connectivity. I might be worth another try.
- oncejapan 5y agoAccording to geni.com[1], he is actually my 31st great grandfather. Anonymized the first part of my line: You → ******** your father → ******** his mother → ******** her mother → ******** her father → ** Johansen his father → Johan Grove Kristoffersen his father → Ingeborg Catharine Jentoft Henrichsdatter Klæboe his mother → Henrich Johan Hansen Klæboe her father → Maren Hansdatter Glein his mother → Margaretha Johansdatter Grøn her mother → Margrethe Christophersdatter Darre her mother → Kristoffer Bjørnsen Bjørnsen her father → Bjørn Rolfson Darre his father → Maren Bjørnsdatter his mother → Johanne Mattisdatter her mother → Margreta Johannesdatter Kruckow her mother → Anne Ludvigsdatter Barsebek her mother → Magdalena Svare her mother → Adelus Eringsdotter Erlingsdtr Tolstad, Hildugard her mother → Elin Jonsdatter Hildugard Tolstad her mother → Sigrid Erlingsdotter Bjarkøy her mother → Elin Thoresdatter Bjarkøy her mother → Ingebjørg Erlingsdatter Bjarkøy her mother → Erling Alvsson Tornberg her father → Ingeborg Bårdsdotter Rein his mother → Bård Skule Guttormsson Rein her father → Sigrid Torkjellsdotter Fugl his mother → Hallkatla Sveinsdatter Av Aurland her mother → Ingerid Svendsdatter of Denmark, Queen Consort of Norway her mother → Sweyn II Estridson, King of Denmark her father → Princess Estrid Margrethe (Margret), Of Svendsdatter his mother → Sweyn I "Forkbeard", king of Denmark, Norway & England her father → Harald "Blue Tooth", king of Denmark his father [1] https://www.geni.com/people/Harald-Blue-Tooth-king-of-Denmark/5473882692080138743 https://www.geni.com/people/Harald-Blue-Tooth-king-of-Denmar...
- 1_player 5y agoA huge amount of people have him as their 30th-something great grandfather. Somewhere in the ballpark of (average # children that grow to adult age per family) ^ 31
- Findecanor 5y agoAnother, perhaps more plausible, theory of why King Harald was nicknamed "Bluetooth" is that it would have been the name of his sword: a sharp "tooth" of blued steel.
- alephnil 5y agoThe reason he was known as Harald Blåtann (Bluetooth) was as mentioned that he had a dead tooth. These are normally black, not blue, but old norse did not distinguish between black and blue, thus the name.
- matsemann 5y agoAs a Norwegian speaking guy, I used to say "blåtann" instead of "bluetooth" as a joke when I was a teenager. Because I found the direct translation funny. Didn't know at the time that I was actually somewhat "correct".
- norenh 5y agoSwedish guy here, can confirm that it was often called "Blåtand" in various circumstances in Sweden at the time (20ish years ago). I have worked with Ericsson-employees who also called it "Blåtand" but nowadays it is less common and "Bluetooth" has taken over as the way to refer to it here.
- Moru 5y agoAmong older people I still hear Blåtand now and then. Some of them think they are funny, some knows why :-)
- adunk 5y agoThe story I heard some 20ish years ago was that the Blåtand name was so popular inside Ericsson that employees were actively encouraged to use the name Bluetooth and not Blåtand. At the time, "everyone" called it Blåtand, outside of Ericsson too. I agree that people in Sweden just tend to call it Bluetooth nowadays.
- eli 5y agoMany ancient languages lacked a word for blue. It doesn't occur very often in nature.
- deleted 5y ago
- natashabaker 5y agoIf you’re curious to learn more about how Bluetooth was named, there’s an interview with Jim Kardach on the topic: https://blog.snapeda.com/2019/10/07/how-bluetooth-got-its-name-an-interview-with-jim-kardach/ https://blog.snapeda.com/2019/10/07/how-bluetooth-got-its-na...
- littlestymaar 5y ago> Bluetooth was only intended as a placeholder until marketing could come up with something really cool.
- pge 5y agoMore King Harald trivia: a story about King Harald making a boastful soldier shoot an apple off of his son’s head is the original source for the later legend of William Tell in Switzerland
- micimize 5y agolooking forward to a future safety-critical network protocol called appleshot
- azinman2 5y agoThat’s actually a pretty good name.
- bborud 5y ago"Hold my mead..."
- knorker 5y agoModern version: We've tied a bomb to your son. It's easy to defuse. Just connect to it via bluetooth and give the "defuse" command. You have 48 hours. Good luck.
- Pentamerous 5y agoThat's interesting, I always thought it was because it was a competitor to Infrared, hence something new with another color in its name. Interesting how random things in my life are assumptions I never questioned.
- lordleft 5y agoNaming one of the most inconsistent technologies I've ever used on the festering tooth of a dead king seems about right
- ChrisMarshallNY 5y agoI used to give that story, in one of my Bluetooth classes. I ended up removing it, to save time, and also, because I used an Albert Uderzo character, from Asterix, as an illustration, and couldn’t share it online, with that image.
- goto11 5y agoJust to be clear, it is conjecture that the nickname was due to a dead tooth. It is not exactly clear what the nickname means. The word we translate to "tooth" could also mean "thane", so it could mean something like "the blue price" or "the black prince". It has been argued that the nickname is unlikely to be because of a bad tooth, since this would have been common enough at the time not to be noteworthy. But of course there might have been some story behind which is lost to time.
- airstrike 5y agoFun fact: last month, a contestant in the Brazilian version of “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?” was asked the million dollar^Wreais question: what is Bluetooth named after? https://gshow.globo.com/google/amp/programas/domingao-com-huck/noticia/professor-rafael-de-andrade-cunha-conquista-r-500-mil-em-quem-quer-ser-um-milionario.ghtml https://gshow.globo.com/google/amp/programas/domingao-com-hu... Spoiler alert: he chose not to answer and walked away with R$500k instead
- RedShift1 5y agoSmart man. Didn't get tempted. He won.
- soheil 5y agoAnd the dead tooth was used as an antenna to communicate with others when his energy levels were low?
- bjornsing 5y agoRelated anecdote: The south of Sweden is full of people who think they “invented Bluetooth”. I’ve met a handful.
- dqpb 5y agoThat’s fitting
- arrakis2021 5y agoKing Harald is one of the best characters on Vikings
- errcorrectcode 5y agoIn '99/00, I remember a cartoon on a slide because the lecturer was involved in the BT spec. It took a while, but he was right that it would be ubiquitous. I do have issues with BT compatibility between some devices with stuttering sound. For example, I have Edifier speakers that don't work properly with Apple devices. Another issue is audio/video latency. aptX Low Latency isn't widely-supported. Receivers, TVs, computers, and any display device chain muxes or demuxes A/V should support an A/V calibration device discoverable by WiFi and BT containing a microphone and light sensor for automatic synchronization. Pairing is a PITA. The behaviors of connecting, selecting, forcing, and moving devices are inconsistent and problematic. AirPods are terrible because they repeatedly connect when not wanted.
- charcircuit 5y agoI find Bluetooth annoying to use since you have to license it. For example if you add an LED to an raspberry pi and you want to sell it to your friend you have to pay $9600 to SIG. (then you also have to pay $xxxx or more to get it certified by the FCC)
- Eduard 5y agoYour comment piqued my interest, and I found this discussion from 2017: https://forums.raspberrypi.com/viewtopic.php?t=173142 https://forums.raspberrypi.com/viewtopic.php?t=173142 It seems you can sell a Raspberry Pi-based contraption without paying SIG fees as long as you make it impossible for end users to use the Bluetooth functionality / disable/brick Bluetooth on the device.
- charcircuit 5y agothat + not using their trademark
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- easrng 5y agoAm I crazy or was it called Blutooth at some point?
- axelfontaine 5y agoYou're thinking rays, not teeth...
- codethief 5y agoSpeaking of Bluetooth, can anyone ELI5 to me why bidirectional Bluetooth audio (sound/microphone, i.e. headset mode) works so much better on Android than on Linux (PulseAudio/Pipewire)? People keep telling me that bidirectional audio is always bad but on Android it seems way less bad and voices actually sound pretty natural. What magic codec are they using? Second question: Why is Android able to switch seamlessly between unidirectional and bidirectional modes while on Linux it seems this is not even possible with a USB dongle(?!) Shouldn't a USB dongle be able to just pretend it's a regular sound card and then take care of the mode/codec switching automatically? I.e. without telling the driver (i.e. the Linux system/PulseAudio/Pipewire) that they are actually talking to a Bluetooth system? Meanwhile, on Windows and Mac this seems to work fine… Overall, I'm just baffled by how bad the situation with Bluetooth audio is on Linux. I mean it's 2022, god dammit.
- Namidairo 5y ago> Speaking of Bluetooth, can anyone ELI5 to me why bidirectional Bluetooth audio (sound/microphone, i.e. headset mode) works so much better on Android than on Linux (PulseAudio/Pipewire)? People keep telling me that bidirectional audio is always bad but on Android it seems way less bad and voices actually sound pretty natural. What magic codec are they using? mSBC probably, which I don't believe is enabled by default in Pipewire currently. (I believe it is just a few lines of config to enable though)
- codethief 5y agoI did try mSBC in Pipewire and it doesn't sound as good as on Android for some reason.
- jbverschoor 5y agoCool. So we can use 2 Unicode characters of the runes to represent the logo!