Bluetooth 5 will quadruple the range, double the speed
engadget.com
engadget.com
- 1.0 to 1.2: Hard to pair, and very unreliable. First major version, I'm sure they'll fix it...
- 2.0: More bandwidth. Still hard to pair, still unreliable.
- 2.1: Adds "Simple Secure Pairing". Still hard to actually pair. Still unreliable.
- 3.0: More bandwidth. More features. Still hard to pair, still unreliable.
- 4.0: Bluetooth Low Energy released. Still hard to pair, still unreliable.
- 4.1: More features. Still hard to pair, still unreliable.
- 4.2: More features. Still hard to pair, still unreliable.
- 5.0: More range, more bandwidth. Still hard to pair, still unreliable.
I have the latest Apple "Magic" Trackpad, hooked up to a Mac Pro. At least once a day, latency will take a dive, or it will completely disconnect. I have to turn the trackpad on and off repeatedly, to see if it will finally re-pair by itself. No other recourse, you can't easily access bluetooth settings on a mac with only a keyboard. (Which I made sure to get with a USB plug, since my last bluetooth keyboard had the same issues.)
I also have a Samsung Level BT headset, paired with a Samsung Note 5 phone. I can listen to Google Music or Player.fm for between 1 and 10 minutes until the headset will suddenly blast noise at full volume, and become unresponsive until I turn it off and back on again. Left my ears ringing on more than one occasion.
I've replaced my "magic" keyboard with a USB one, and recently hooked the trackpad back up via USB. I've stopped using the Samsung Level and went back to an old pair of headphones with a 3.5mm plug (that Apple is now trying to get rid of.)
I had a past without wires. I am moving to a future with them.
The power of Bluetooth is set to explode when the next version of the wireless technology is released at the turn of the year. Bluetooth 5 will offer eight times the broadcasting capacity, have four times the range, and run twice as fast as current Bluetooth technology, the organization responsible for development of Bluetooth announced on Thursday. The increased broadcasting capacity could pave the way for the introduction of "connectionless" data transfers, meaning that the need to pair a Bluetooth device like a headset or wireless keyboard with a mobile app or computer program may become a thing of the past. Longer range means that it will be possible to use Bluetooth devices throughout the home, and higher speeds will make these devices more responsive."
http://ccm.net/news/27500-bluetooth-5-promises-an-end-to-pai...
I've never had a good experience with desktops and bluetooth devices however.
I wonder why drivers are so much better on mobile?
Me I've been lucky, though not a heavy BT user, so that may be the crux. This and then you have other things like wifi and interference from many things that could curtail signal
But for a keyboard right next to a device I would expect that to be less of an issue.
So with drivers and chipset variations, and quick google shows, can be some fun and games. But true of any digital communication device, will always be not perfect.
But in general I wonder if those who have had issues, have seen them get worse over time with BT or better? I know people who have had issues and a later driver fixes that issue, even instability ones outlined.
As in, they are not internally shielding the two from each other. This is largely a problem on Apple products due to their "creative" way of designing hardware internally, but not limited to Apple only.
The only positive bluetooth experience I've had lately was playing the mobile game Spaceteam. Why is a 6-year-old free app the only example that comes to mind? My 1st-gen Pebble is still okay-ish; it does frequently disconnect but it usually manages to reconnect without intervention or disrupting itself.
(This rant bookends nicely into talking about how shitty smart TVs are too, but I'll try to restrain myself.)
Unfortunately, there aren't viable wireless connectivity alternatives for commercial products other than Wi-Fi for long range and Bluetooth for short range. And both suffer from high (and rising) interference levels in the ISM bands.
With Bluetooth you have a list of profiles that define protocols for various use cases.
A car head unit is likely using A2DP and AVRCP to handle the streaming and playback controls respectively. It may also implement HFP to allow it to act as a handsfree.
Wifi direct do not even, last i checked, have a defined protocol for transferring files between devices. This while Bluetooth supports OBEX, that allows you to either push individual files, or browse the storage of a device remotely.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Bluetooth_profiles
Thats the list of Bluetooth profiles at present.
The damn thing has been sitting on my desk for months and I don't even know where the charger went. You'd think if your whole hardware experience is based around Bluetooth, you'd be able to iron out the rough edges.
I used to loathe bluetooth, but now I'm wondering if it's shoddy implementations that are to blame?
Except the Garmin Fenix I bought a month ago has been rock...m'f'ing...solid. I walk away from phone, watch buzzes, walk back, watch buzzes and says it's connected again. Every time. I pull up the Garmin app, it's always connected. In a month of heavy usage, it has NEVER failed to reconnect or stay connected to the phone. Always get my notifications. Couldn't begin to say what the difference is, but someone appears to be doing it right and someone else: meh, not so much.
I don't know what others are doing wrong, but I basically reimplemented Apple's Core Bluetooth for a hardware piece that allowed old iPhones (4 or less, IIRC) to pretend they had BTLE, and consequentially pretend they supported Core Bluetooth. We tested heavily, never had issues, sold it to users, and I don't recall support issues with connectivity (I'm sure someone had an issue, but not enough that it was ever brought to our attention). I believe the devices sold like dog poop sandwiches, but it was for a company large enough that they probably sold more of their devices than Pebble has sold, so I would think we'd have heard about it if there were issues. But if I did anything "right", I couldn't tell you what it was, as I just followed the specs as best I could.
In summary, it would appear that it's possible to get devices to reliably connect and stay connected, but I don't know what the secret is.
Where things have gotten the messiest for me is when you connect multiple devices and the system has to make arbitrary decisions - e.g. when my wife and I are both in the car, whose phone should the car sync with? These are design decisions for which there is no exact answer.
https://secure.logitech.com/en-us/product/multi-device-keybo...
If you prefer wires, the new trackpad will work as a wired device as well if you just leave it plugged in. For some incomprehensible reason, Apple placed the Lightning port on the bottom of the new mouse so that one can't be used wired, but they weren't so catastrophically stupid with the trackpad.
I want something to completely replace it. Hopefully coming from WiFi 802.11. Sadly I am not aware of anything coming.
It comes down to standards compliance and quality control issues.
Except every other BT device around you, just not yours.
It was actually pretty reliable, and felt like the future. I'd get in, turn the car on, my phone would pair itself and pick up where it left off, and I never once had to take it or my keys out of my pocket. Then I started to actually listen to my music.
The audio over bluetooth was frequently out of tune. I'm a musician, so I can definitely hear this and it's infuriating. VLC on Windows had the same problem for years and everyone told me I was crazy, but the car was at least twice as bad. It sounded like an old cassette player, if anyone remembers those. Googling reveals this to be a common issue with many different varieties of bluetooth speaker. I can only imagine it's doing some sort of time stretching to "hide" latency in the packets but, well, it's not hiding it well enough for my ears. Trying to listen to anything melodic, especially piano pieces, was just awful.
Fortunately, I discovered that my car also has a shockingly excellent USB Audio implementation, so I copied the Music from my phone onto a large USB drive and have been happy ever since. More wires for me please, the future isn't ready.
Instead, I use Syncthing, so my files are synced properly between the phone and my computer using my wireless network, no cables needed. I just copy the same folder to my USB drive periodically and don't need to mess with it beyond that. (In a pinch, I suppose I could use the OTG cable to update the USB drive using my phone.) I like being able to have the drive plugged into the car at all times, as it's one less thing to fiddle with when getting in and out.
If I'm going to plug a wire into my phone for my car, I'd much rather just use the standard AUX (3.5mm headphone jack) port that's built in, as it's simpler and more reliable. I still do this from time to time if I feel like using Youtube, Google Play, or another streaming based service, or if I need to hear something on my phone (like Navigation).
I agree. I have a Ford, and the interface is as good as any I've experienced with respect to Bluetooth enabled vehicles. But there's a definite drop in "sound quality" compared to USB based devices or CDs. I only ever use it when we're bored of what we've brought and want to stream Google Play.
I've tried out a number of in-car bluetooth setups over the years and I've found that the quality varies pretty significantly between both auto makers and aftermarket units. Ford and Toyota are pretty solid where as Chrysler and Honda are pretty awful. As far as aftermarket solutions go, GROM is decent and USA SPEC is horrid steaming crap.
Another unfortunate occurrence I encountered was that Android paired with certain systems (Honda) will prefer to stream audio over the HSP/HFP stacks instead of A2DP or will switch when a call is incoming and stick. This is tons of fun because HSP/HFP use very low quality codecs meant tuned for voice applications.
Now that Bluetooth is high bandwidth, I would like to see them add a new audio streaming stack that just accepted PCM/FLAC/AAC/MP3/OGG in all their glory.
I've got a lot of tech, bt stuff everywhere and the ones that work the best have the best switching software.
one of the most solid pieces of bt management software is in the Samsung necklace headphones.
these things flawlessly switch between devices, rarely ever skip much less drop a signal.
they're now about 30 bucks, crappy physical design makes them too uncomfortable sadly.
compare with a set of headphones with supposed latency software built in, avantree makes a set of these headphones.
avantree couldn't code themselves out of a wet paper bag, so they ruined a perfectly great pair of headphones because they hired some random company who doesn't know bt programming and so those headphones are great for about 15 minutes and then memory leak or something and they start sucking like all the other bt devices with crappy software.
IMO bt sucks because people can't code and there isn't a OSS client software bt solution that fixes it, so far. and getting Samsung to hook it up with their headphone code base is probably not gonna happen.
These days, I have a DualShock 4 controller which Windows 7 and 10 don't like, using 4 different Bluetooth radios. It also won't pair with my FireTV, though this is possibly a purposeful limitation because Amazon wants to sell me their controller.
Speaking of that FireTV, the Bluetooth remote doesn't work the majority of the time, and eats a pair of Energizer lithium AAAs about every 3 weeks. It's nice that it's not IR, and I usually just use the Fire remote app instead of the physical remote, but it annoys me to no end that we've replaced something which was simple and reliable with something which is complex and wonky; same problem with touchscreen everything in cars and everywhere these days, but that's a rant for another time.
I have a nice pair of Logitech Ultimate Ears UE9000 headphones which have audio glitches every 1-60 seconds when connected to my PC. This makes gaming on them basically impossible. The range for a good connection is about 6'. I usually just plug them in, negating why I bought wireless headphones.
My Automatic OBD dongle works well -- except for the super unreliable Bluetooth connection, which pairs about 80% of the time anywhere between 5 seconds after I start my car to 10 minutes into a drive. Trying to get it into the actual "connected" mode where it can work (poorly, at a slow and highly variable update rate) with Harry's Lap Timer is an exercise in frustration, killing the iOS app multiple times, trying to re-pair it, toggling Bluetooth, etc.
My Suunto Ambit 3 watch works unreliably with Bluetooth, and the messaging "smart"watch feature is so annoying to use that I just turn it off and sync it manually with a laptop. Bluetooth again here. Their proprietary fitness band (which can also do Bluetooth) works fine with the watch.
A Polar fitness band did so poorly with pairing that I replaced it with the Suunto belt mentioned above for use with the watch. Pairing to my phone would work about half the time. These fitness bands are also annoying since they have no status light to indicate power or Bluetooth connection state; you just have to get it wet so it conducts and hope it's on and that the battery isn't flat.
In my car I have a Pioneer aftermarket radio with Bluetooth. It doesn't support a profile which lets me play audio, only hands-free phone call mode. The USB connection mis-pairs with my iPhone about half the time. The Bluetooth feature for syncing the phone book is worthless.
I also have some Jaybird Bluebuds X Bluetooth headphones. These mostly work fine, and switch connections better than almost any other BT device I've owned. The audio does drop occasionally, but they're pretty good for listening to directions on a motorcycle.
By far the BT device I've been most pleased with has been the Logitech Megaboom speaker. It never drops connection and switches pairing flawlessly between multiple phones and a PC. The only problem I can think of is that many phones don't account for a Bluetooth device which may be in range which you don't wish to immediately attempt to pair with, so they'll "steal" the Megaboom from a good connection whenever they have some audio (like an unlocking the phone sound) to play.
On the proprietary side, we have an XBone Elite controller with an expensive dongle which works perfectly, aside from the Windows store requiring about 4 hours of tinkering with registry settings and "repair" tools to get it to download the controller settings program from MS. The latency is great and it never drops out.
I have a few Logitech Unifying RX-compatible devices. They all work flawlessly. By comparison, a Logitech BT backlit keyboard I have loses pairing, doesn't connect, etc with various PCs, phones, and the FireTV.
Bluetooth is infuriating and has been for over a decade. I really hope that they address the pairing and reliability issues, but that doesn't seem to be in the cards.
The only real problem is switching between devices is still much more annoying than it should be (I ought to be able to just select the device from the drop-down on the desired device).
It's a huge mess and its not just a matter of the technology not working as designed. These are fundamental problems that nobody seems to worry too much about, apart from a small number of vendors (Apple did a decent job solving the pairing problem with the Apple TV: http://9to5mac.com/2013/07/29/new-apple-tv-os-offers-nfc-lik...).
I realise it's pretty hard to beat the intuitive action of plugging physical cables into devices to connect two things, but if we really want to get rid of cables, things need to be easier.
For example, some devices that I have pair only to a single peer, while others have no problems switching between several, while another device is limited to two peers--requiring a reset if you want a third.
I suggest that anyone buying a bluetooth device test out pairing between multiple devices and if the device makes you jump through hopes to switch between bluetooth peers then immediately return it.
Too bad this method can’t be more generally used.
edit: nevermind, just noticed you said magic trackpad 2
I'm surprised they didn't use some custom protocol, especially given how bad Bluetooth is, and they control the entire software and hardware stack.
I get sooooo tired of Windows either remember old stuff or forgetting new stuff. It is such a kludge of an OS.
Mind you, i have also been able to connect to a USB dongle through solid wood walls, so mileage may vary.
Never mind that you can get two classes of radios, on top of the LE stuff. With each class having different transmission strengths.
There are also headphones with built in players, I don't know how the quality of those is though.
Because you might want to stream audio from the Internet, or you don't want to waste time converting newer audio formats to MP3 and then copying them over, or you'd rather not have cables around you when you work out, or you might want to track what you've listen (particularly useful for audiobooks and long podcasts), etc.
Yes, these are not indispensable life necessities nor anything like that, but given the choice, I'd rather beam the audio from my tablet than carry an extra player.
Sony still does players but they're not very good.
More range may help thing. Well I can hope anyway.
Not sure. I remember reading an article some time ago that stated the Sun's electromagnetic radiation could interfere with Bluetooth and it's always worked with my observations. I've used multiple Plantronics headsets, Motorola headphones and an off brand of headphones all with an iPhone 5S, iPhone 6+, Nexus 6P, Moto X and a Note 3 and in all of these devices they work great indoors and going outside on a sunny day it would break up (but cloudy always seemed to work better).
It's entirely possible this is some crazy bullshit but my observations are real. So if it ends up being that the Sun does NOT provide interfere then it must be SOMETHING. I just had this issue this past week when I was working outside and had to grab my wired headphones.
And likely your best results will be if both devices are v5 devices.
The only times I've trouble with BT outside is when tons of people or shops are nearby (overcrowded 2.4 ghz spectrum I assume - bt, wifi, etc)
Well, I've used wireless keyboards (Apple compact) and wireless headphones (Parrot Zik 2.0), and had zero disconnects under the hottest of Suns in several different countries.
What do you mean "line of sight"? How far were you? Was it behind some wall or something? With the iPad/phone on my pocket/bag I never had any issue.
Basically if the BT hardware itself was on the right side of my head then my phone had to be in my right pocket or I'd get semi frequent disconnects outside. So not really line-of-sight in visual spectrum terms but I have had so many observations with so many bluetooth headsets and headphones and different phones that I always believed the original article I read a long time ago about sun interference (which, of course, I can't find today).
It could certainly be something else but I most certainly have reproducible issues with using bluetooth outside versus inside my house or even car.
Sounds like it's more about some flimsy and/or underpowered BT headsets.
That said - that seems rather impressive for Bluetooth, I've had one reinforced concrete wall pretty consistently screw up most bluetooth signals in my experience, so I'd posit that you're getting unusually good reception there.
[1]https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=209473
I've heard a couple of complaints about Macs but they're rare.
Seems the Android BT stack is just more... flaky. I wonder why...
Come 4.4 Google partnered up with qualcomm (again iirc) to write a new stack from scratch.
Then again, if I'm biking and my phone is in my right pocket and I turn my head to the left, the audio skips. So I don't know if I can blame than on range, but there's something odd going on there.
Zigbee and other 802.15.4 protocols will always be at a disadvantage even for tasks the Bluetooth protocol is not suited for. Bluetooth chips are cheap and more widely supported than anything else because Bluetooth radios are manufactured at massive scale for the phone market.
And BTLE is specifically designed to work without the pairing dance.
Actually, for industrial applications, it's more likely to be Zigbee that is already there, and the economies of scale will favour it over BTLE (particularly when you consider Zigbee allows thousands of devices in a network, while BTLE can't even get to double digits). There's a ton of other advantages to Zigbee for industrial applications (not the least of which is resiliency).
Maybe you want a bluetooth bridge (though WiFi is probably very tempting for that purpose), but bluetooth is bad enough at doing its own job, let alone something else.
Though personally i don't either.
BLE is almost and entirely different protocol, albeit implemented on the same chipset, which is running alongside the existing Bluetooth stack on your phone. Nothing in the Bluetooth 4.0 spec reduces the power usage of the Basic Rate and Enhanced Data Rate modes.
One would be lead to believe that 3.1 and the C plug is one and the same, But they are not.
There are actually 3 different specs that the OEMs can combine in various ways.
First is the C plug spec, that can be used with or without the Power Delivery and 3.1 data spec.
Then there is the 3.1 data spec, that is so minor an update to the 3.0 spec that effectively all 3.0 devices are 3.1 compatible. It can be used with A and C plugs alike.
Then there is the Power Delivery spec. This promises that you can get up to 20V out of a USB port, any USB port. Yep, you can encounter A ports that can go up to 20V if you have the right device and cable at the other end.
This is such a great analogy on so many levels. The natural tendency of software projects to exhibit the effects of entropy.
The dropped audio, stutters, and need to reconnect are driving me crazy. I've now switched back to a generic audio cable.
Bluetooth reliability really is dire, the phone is within 10m of wherever the car transceiver is and in the designed hotspot too (inside the car) and it still fails.
The only things that seems to do this reliably are PS4 controllers with my PC.
At least Bluetooth mice/trackpads need better response time.
For example Magic Trackpad 2 is so horrible to use compared to Macbook built in trackpad because of bluetooth latency.
It's also jarring for audio and it doesn't help that they also use latency-inducing SBC.
You might need more range.
I have connectivity problems (short drop-outs) with a little BT receiver I use with the bone-conduction headphones (not BT themselves) I use when running if I have the receiver clipped to my shorts on the side opposite the arm I have the phone arm-band on but not if it is clipped to the other side or higher up.
The problem presumably is that the 10m range is an "up to" figure achieved in ideal conditions and having my body between the two devices is not ideal conditions.
Of course if the interference is of the "no signal at all is going to get through the noise floor" variety then increasing the range (presumably by increasing power output?) isn't going to help.
I think they need to focus 100% of their efforts on addressing some of these issues which seem to have been a problem since the beginning.
Bluetooth is “almost there” in my opinion. It’s incredibly convenient (when it works), and I can envision how great it will be once they work all the kinks out. It has been getting better and I’m confident it will keep improving.
Let me just add another data point:
I have a 2013 Android phone and a 2011 car. Luckily, the car supports playing audio through Bluetooth which is really cool when it works. However, every time I get into the car, there’s a 50/50 chance that BT audio will actually work. The phone always pairs with the car, but it seems like it doesn’t reliably “negotiate” the audio capability. Sometimes I can make a phone call which seems to reset the system and can cause it to start working, but other times I have to actually power cycle the phone.
The other issue is that every once-in-a-while, there will be this spontaneous audible crackle. After the initial crackle occurs, there will be periodic crackles about once every 10 seconds from there on out. The only way to get it out of this state is to make a call or restart the phone. It seems almost like there’s some kind of memory leak in a buffer or something which causes it to eventually run dry and bounce off of being empty.
These issues seem more software related and probably have nothing to do with the Bluetooth standard itself, but I won’t let that stop me from ranting.
Linux support was reasonably good, though with bizarre quirks and changes of tooling between libbluetooth versions. OSX was a total nightmare.
The project is currently stalled because three days before I had to head off (I was doing all of the programming and troubleshooting on the software side) my collaborators decided to inform me that they would be using a different laptop to what they'd been using for the rest of the project, and when we tried our software with that version of OSX and hardware, it refused to work nicely. We eventually came up with a bizarre pairing ritual that involved removing devices, then quickly adding them, and in a specific order, and then that mysteriously stopped working and now I don't have access to hardware to fix it.
Knowing what I now know, if I'd had my time again I would have recommended ESP8266 based boards instead of the LightBlue Beans we were using. Even though one of our requirements was low power usage (which we certainly got through Bluetooth 4), it probably would have been less hassle to just make the WiFi modem sleep for a period and then transmit in bursts.
I've got a brand new Plugable BT4 dongle that barely works in Win 10 because Broadcom haven't updated their suite so it relies on the default 10 drivers - you can't have a HFP and A2DP service running at the same time so a headset with speakers and mic won't work.
It's been bad from day one with Widcomm and later Bluesoleil on Windows. Mac OS X for years had a Bluetooth where after a couple of hours of using the DUN profile it would need a reboot, on an otherwise nicely reliable operating system. Mice on Bluetooth have never worked as smoothly, reliably, or as well as just using a proprietary protocol like Logitech Unifying.
It's not that I necessarily think it's an unsolvable problem, it's just that after a decade with so many multiple implementations that can't get it right I feel Bluetooth itself has to bear some responsibility.
I so can't wait for phones to drop 3.5mm jacks so playing music can become an infuriating ritual too
While it's true that audio quality over HFP is a lot worse than A2DP, note that A2DP is designed for cases where latency is not an issue, you want stereo audio, and there is no microphone audio to carry the other way. (i.e., designed to listen to music)
If you want low latency mono-audio to the headset + microphone audio back to the host, there is no choice except to use HFP.
Note that if your headset (and your host device) supports HFP1.6, then it should support wideband speech/HD voice and the difference should not be so drastic.
But in recent years it has become more and more invisible. You've probably used Bluetooth in the past 12 months without noticing. Invisibility is something that the Bluetooth SIG should strive for.
With wifi you have a single channel, and basically ethernet. On top of that anything goes as far as software is concerned.
With Bluetooth you have channel hopping radios, a pairing system for devices, and a bunch of profiles/protocols that define anything from basic serial data to encoding agnostic audio.
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/06/bluetooth-5-spec-comi...
I remember from an Intel demo from a while ago, where they showcased a number of peripherals using their inductive charging tech, where you can just dump them onto a large inductive charging pad along with your phone and tablet without having to fumble with plugging wires into each one. That's the killer feature for a wireless device, in my opinion.
A USB dongle that somehow pairs to my Apple Keyboard and Touchpad and presents itself as a standard USB keyboard and mouse to the OS.
I could plug said device to my cinema display's USB hub. This way both me and my wife could use the same workstation by simply plugging in the computer.
The key exchange vulnerability was addressed in Bluetooth 4.2, which implements ECDH and is at least theoretically secure. [2]
[1] https://www.usenix.org/conference/woot13/workshop-program/pr...
[2] http://blog.bluetooth.com/everything-you-always-wanted-to-kn...
https://pomcor.com/2015/06/03/has-bluetooth-become-secure/
Basically Passkey Entry is broken so eavesdroppers can trivially learn the PIN. You must use a dynamic PIN (not always possible).
Oh and if you're thinking you can implement your own pairing method that is actually secure, via the Out-of-Band method, think again! Neither Android nor iOS support it.
I'm not sure this is actually true (unless you're talking about bugs with individual manufacturers implementation on Android?). Both iOS and Android support SSP with OOB key exchange via NFC.
There are lots of products that have been available that use this for pairing/connecting, eg: https://www.bose.com/en_us/support/article/pairing-a-device-...
https://android.googlesource.com/platform/frameworks/base.gi...
I'm pretty sure iOS doesn't support pairing via NFC.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/nfc-speakers-from-apple-you-c...
http://www.informationweek.com/mobile/mobile-business/iphone...
So, no, they don't support OOB (except in one limited case on Android).
Also, I guess that, for many IoT devices, keeping range and speed the same while decreasing power usage significantly (although, as a third guess, I expect 'double the speed' means that devices can go to low power mode quicker, potentially halving power usage of the entire device) might be more useful.
But I have to admit that it seems to work pretty well on my iPhone while years ago on other phones I had a lot of disconnects. I have one of the LG around the neck headsets and it's actually really good at this point.
I'd like to see more BT headsets for PC hit the market. The only ones I could find were from Turtle Beach.
These are great but the real drawback that keeps me from going wireless is still the audio quality. Hopefully this upgrade will be the end of that.
I bought one of the very few 3.5mm cellphone headsets I could find (Voistek) for my wife and it works pretty well. We shouldn't be forced into choosing between wired up for charging or wired up for headset/headphones.
Now they are planning for late 2016, means it will only be available in new phones from 2017
I sort of thought the short range was, kind of, a feature ...
How far do you really want your mouse trails and your keystrokes to fly out into the ether ?
One can dream...
All of this excess radiation is bound to cause some potential mutations in DNA. Adding even more is only going to increase the probabilities.
> “Next year it will work great” should be Bluetooth’s slogan.
Bluetooth 4 is actually not bad at all in my experience. Pairing is painless relative to old versions; sound quality is flawless; connections are quite reliable. The "strain" is to be expected around other devices since Bluetooth uses 2.4GHz, a very crowded band. I can't speak to the technical bits since I never looked at them, but my experience as a consumer has been positive.
Sure, it doesn't have the same range as a WiFi router, but it also doesn't use 1.5-20 watts (My source: http://www.tpcdb.com/list.php?type=11)
BT needs fewer features and better implementations. But apparently interop and reliability are not sexy enough for the BT standards folks to worry about. Can you imagine TCP/IP being in the same quality hole that Bluetooth is in?
I don't blame the Bluetooth standard though, messy as it might be. That's clearly terrible implementation on the car manufacturer's part.
Given the types of products that are made with BT support, the hostile environments that they're developed within, and the common after-sales abandonment of support, BT should be a simpler protocol that is a LOT more resilient to implementation mistakes. But I don't think that anyone designs protocols to withstand institutional failure :-)
When you combine randChip with randBtStack, the end result is not necessarily a quality product. The poor engineers who have to work with this combination end up resorting to sending reset commands to their chip in an attempt to get the damn thing working.
The two issues I saw were Bluetooth is based on a frequency hopping radio using a dated low performance modulation scheme. The only nice thing you could say is potentially you can build really low power radio's using that design. However that brings up the second issues, a very complicated kitchen sink base band which requires a complex software stack and power hungry processor to support it. There goes your low power, out the window. (I think there were about 20 companies trying to design low power Bluetooth transceivers circa 2000-2003, most of them never could get the power low enough or a working stack)
Hardware design issues aside, frequency hoppers have insurmountable quality of service issues for most applications. Professionally I don't think this is fixable.
They would have been better off doing the following three things.
1. Define a low speed point to point oriented modulation scheme that can be supported by 802.11 radio front ends. Probably could have implemented this as a sub-band of some sort.
2. A direct sequence spread spectrum physical layer for USB. Advantage of that is the USB stack mostly works as USB had a 10 year head start and more resources than the Bluetooth alliance ever had, or will have. If one thinks a stack like USB is 'easy' consider Microsoft had to redesign theirs three or four times.
3. Dedicated DSSS wireless headphone spec. Seriously this was the original design goal and was totally achievable until the committee responsible for the spec lost their minds.
Don't get me started on security. BT is probably a festering pit of remote exploits and vendor backdoors.
That's the point. If you want a heavily opinionated summary that will likely inflame a fair portion of people, Gruber is your man.
I have a headset that supports Bluetooth 3 only and audio quality is bad (especially while making calls where it chooses the HFP profile which is the only one where the mic is available).
I vouched to never again buy any Bluetooth audio devices. Are you saying Bluetooth 4 would actually solve my problem? Should I still have hope?
Make sure your headset and device (phone?) both support HFP1.6 or above (which supports wideband speech/HD voice) which makes the sound quality semi-decent
With Bluetooth in particular it seems like there are a lot of poor implementations (if it's rock solid or buggy seems to have to do with which two devices you're using ) - maybe they would benefit from a more stringent conformity licensing process.
1. Reliable 2. Cheap 3. Low power
Pick no more than two. Bluetooth was originally designed to be cheap and low power.
The other problem is networking is complicated, and then throwing device API's on top of that makes it very hard to get right. USB had lots of issues originally. And once you leave standard devices like, keyboards, mice, and mass storage devices it gets iffy real quick. (Go scan through the libUSB mailing list archives sometime)
Don't know how I could live without that "feature".
I think nearby is a really cool idea for many things, but I don't know if it is worth all of the notifications I will have to ignore from every billboard I walk by.
I had no problem connecting a keyboard and phone (as modem) to a N800 back in the day, while also playing music from the phone to a pair of bluetooth headphones. But that was if i used PAN For the data connection between N800 and phone.
If i used DUN, either the music or the data would occasionally skip.
And that may well be what gives Bluetooth its reputation. So many choices for the various OEMs in terms of protocols/profiles, on top of a more complex air interface (channel hopping).
Given all of it, one may well be better off comparing Bluetooth to USB than wifi. As wifi is Ethernet over a single radio channel.
Your hardware? Not always.
Use Bluetooth home spekaers, headphones and car radio all the time against my iPhone 6S - works really well.
What I do though is manually connect when I want this particular device to be connected (say my headphones in the gym), and then disconnect after use.
Might be magic trick most are missing.