3 ms·

Bluetooth remains an 'unusually painful' technology after two decades

5 points by elorant 4y ago

airbreather 4y ago
Not all Bluetooth, it seems there are pervasive stacks that have problems because everything made by Plantronics I have ever used reconnects instantly and has no problems. My Alpine car sound system, for instance, takes some time to connect and every now and then ends up in a not paired and a not "not paired" mode that can't be escaped other than to wait some long minutes. I liken it to PDF - could be good but implementation seems to regularly fail because of complexity.
- cratermoon 4y ago
  > everything made by Plantronics That pretty much illustrates the problem. If it's compatible with Plantronics, great, but is the Plantronics implementation compatible with the standard. We all know how fun it is to interop with any standard that Microsoft, for example, has adopted. One vendor's work may be a letter- and intent-perfect implementation of the standard as written, but if it doesn't interop with Microsoft (or whoever the dominant vendor is) then nobody will buy it.
- hulitu 4y ago
  > Not all Bluetooth, it seems there are pervasive stacks that have problems because everything made by Plantronics I have ever used reconnects instantly and has no problems. PC disconnected. After 3 seconds: PC connected. Rinse and repeat at random times during a meeting. I would never buy such a piece of .... (work headphones).
zaptheimpaler 4y ago
The latest pain point i ran into: My headphones can be paired with only one of Windows or Linux in a dual boot configuration when both OSes use the same bluetooth card. I fixed it once by pairing in the right order, poking around and copying the pairing keys and whatever one OS uses into the other. My headphones crashed and abruptly turned off several times when i was doing this. But this broke recently and i can't be bothered to fix it again. This is on the otherwise great WH1000XM4s that support 2 simultaneous bluetooth connections. It's frustrating because even on devices that otherwise work close to perfect, there are these weird edge cases that no one has thought about or fixed.
- arthurcolle 4y ago
  This comment really just sounds like XKCD 1172 [0] [0] - https://xkcd.com/1172/ https://xkcd.com/1172/, "Workflow"
  - zaptheimpaler 4y ago
    lol.. trying to use my headphones in 2 OSes doesnt sound all that obscure to me, but sure.
denimnerd42 4y ago
my 2018 toyota is the worst. on a recent roadtrip it would disconnect my iphone and start playing music from my wife’s every time we stopped for gas. the music was the free u2 album you get on itunes. then i try to reconnect my phone and it sticks at “connecting” that needs to fail before i can connect from my iphone settings screen.

5 points by elorant 4y ago

Not all Bluetooth, it seems there are pervasive stacks that have problems because everything made by Plantronics I have ever used reconnects instantly and has no problems. My Alpine car sound system, for instance, takes some time to connect and every now and then ends up in a not paired and a not "not paired" mode that can't be escaped other than to wait some long minutes. I liken it to PDF - could be good but implementation seems to regularly fail because of complexity.

cratermoon 4y ago
> everything made by Plantronics That pretty much illustrates the problem. If it's compatible with Plantronics, great, but is the Plantronics implementation compatible with the standard. We all know how fun it is to interop with any standard that Microsoft, for example, has adopted. One vendor's work may be a letter- and intent-perfect implementation of the standard as written, but if it doesn't interop with Microsoft (or whoever the dominant vendor is) then nobody will buy it.
hulitu 4y ago
> Not all Bluetooth, it seems there are pervasive stacks that have problems because everything made by Plantronics I have ever used reconnects instantly and has no problems. PC disconnected. After 3 seconds: PC connected. Rinse and repeat at random times during a meeting. I would never buy such a piece of .... (work headphones).

zaptheimpaler 4y ago

The latest pain point i ran into: My headphones can be paired with only one of Windows or Linux in a dual boot configuration when both OSes use the same bluetooth card. I fixed it once by pairing in the right order, poking around and copying the pairing keys and whatever one OS uses into the other. My headphones crashed and abruptly turned off several times when i was doing this. But this broke recently and i can't be bothered to fix it again. This is on the otherwise great WH1000XM4s that support 2 simultaneous bluetooth connections. It's frustrating because even on devices that otherwise work close to perfect, there are these weird edge cases that no one has thought about or fixed.

arthurcolle 4y ago
This comment really just sounds like XKCD 1172 [0] [0] - https://xkcd.com/1172/ https://xkcd.com/1172/, "Workflow"
- zaptheimpaler 4y ago
  lol.. trying to use my headphones in 2 OSes doesnt sound all that obscure to me, but sure.

denimnerd42 4y ago

my 2018 toyota is the worst. on a recent roadtrip it would disconnect my iphone and start playing music from my wife’s every time we stopped for gas. the music was the free u2 album you get on itunes. then i try to reconnect my phone and it sticks at “connecting” that needs to fail before i can connect from my iphone settings screen.