Source: I know one of the engineers who was on the project.
The reason why I bought a bluetooth toothbrush was for a wireless hardware clock, brushing timer, and ranking system which also really doesn't work correctly even with the app.
Gamification of dental health! I think this is a good thing.
We are truly living in a modern fall of rome. We will choke on our bluetooth enabled toothbrushes, 700 dollar juicer machines, our fucking fitbits. We've ravaged the earth to adorn ourselves with decadent shackles and we will reap the consequences with fake tans and ultra clean teeth.
In the past year I've gone from being an environmentalist to a big fan of the end times. We're going to eat ourselves out of a home, and a few billion years later, the Earth will still be here, not missing us at all. Fuck it, get three bluetooth toothbrushes next time.
You don't appreciate the diversity?
Fake tans are better than cancer and ultra clean teeth sounds like it would cut down on dental issues.
Something like 70% of Americans are vitamin-D deficient. Get some damn sunlight.
We are truly living in a modern fall of rome
(It's probably historically wrong, but still a popular belief.)
Phone apps...for a goddamn toothbrush. Were someone to ask me, "Mike, you do a lot of Bluetooth work, what if we BT-enabled our electric toothbrush...what kind of value could we add with that?" Because I'm horrible at coming up with creative ideas for new technologies, I'd come up with something lame like, say, maybe a "ranking system". I could add a "brushing timer", but a plain ol' Sonicare can do that without adding radios, so why bother? And my manager, because she's smart that way, says "meh, I guess it was a dumb idea, but never hurts to ask, right?" Except at Oral B they say, "outSTANDING, Jones! I think you're in line for a promotion!"
And don't take this personally, ecomhacker. You bought such a beast for your own good reasons and need not answer to me. I'm just both astounded and horrified that such a thing even exists.
I got the toothbrush because I am depressed/a drug addict and usually don't brush my teeth as often as I should. I was using a tracking app, but I figured since it was bluetooth I might be able to integrate it with the app I'm using for tracking. I figured it wouldn't support this out of the box, but I'm a CS/EE and figured if I was bored, it would be one more toy to play with.
TLDR, I've got money to burn and I'm spending it to avoid personal responsibility
I find it disturbing that we're moving to an era where even simple devices require the equivalent of a sonic screwdriver to make work.
I really, really wish we had a generic discovery, configuration and reporting protocol (like HTML forms but much more rigid and no styling) for configuring bluetooth devices that was open, and popular enough that companies would feel pressured to use it.
Then again, I really wish we had the exact same thing for IoT devices on the local network.
I swear, if it was good enough, and you marketed it to the Chinese knock-off manufacturers (who I assume would love to take some open source embedded code and not write their own), it might actually get enough momentum to force the brand names to support it as well.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simple_Network_Management_Prot...
That is, SNMP might make a good underlying protocol that something that is much more constrained might sit on top of. Ideally, a simpler markup language that can compile down to SNMP.
E.g. a "device" has one or more named "config-forms" (which an app might choose to represent each as a separate tab or section), with a well defined set of settings with a name, type (integer, decimal, sized string) and description. A device might have one or more "reports" which provide a consolidated view of particular variables.
Very simplistic, but with simplicity comes interoperability. SNMP by itself is far too general to support this without some constraints put on top of it (as far as I know, at least. I have experience with SNMP, but not a huge amount, and not for a long time).
I'm pretty much in the same place on SNMP... Had to do some integration with it 10 years ago. Had to even do some Google-fu to remember the name, since the only thing that would come to mind was SMTP.
The downside is that ANC is on all the time, with no way to disable it. But they're actually better headphones.
The reason I got the app is because it does firmware updates. They've released quite a few updates to improve audio quality, noise cancelling, and compatibility with some devices.