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Comment by c2h5oh | Hacker News Reader

Bluetooth implementations are so stupidly quirky I can totally see proprietary dongles as being required to guarantee connectivity.

Fitbit won't pair with my phone, but works OK with my wife's and my tablet. Garmin fitness tracker syncs with all 3 devices, but will stop syncing with my wife's phone within 2-3 days and will need to be paired again.. My bluetooth headphones work with my phone and my wife's phone, but not my tablet. Every 6 months or so I still have to use a paperclip to reset the headphones to be able to re-pair them with my phone after they stop working for no reason.

I've seen similar problems with phones I've owned before.

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Another example of this is with 'Windows Mixed Reality' VR headsets. The controllers connect with the computer via Bluetooth and will often be noticeably laggy or unreliable when using onboard Bluetooth due to interference from other devices on the motherboard. Switching to an external Bluetooth dongle on a USB extension cable results in significantly improved controller tracking, and this issue is partly to blame for the poor reputation of WMR controller tracking.

I suspect that's one of the reasons Valve put a Bluetooth receiver inside the original Vive headset.

They also didn't use it to connect to the controllers. They used two nRF24L01 transceivers which use Nordic's proprietary shockburst protocol. Easier to set up and better latency.

Yeah, the second-gen[1] Samsung Odyssey+ headset likewise has a built-in dedicated receiver in the headset and it's a significant improvement over the first gen. (I like the first gen better in practically every other way though.)

[1] There's much debate about what 'first gen', 'second gen' actually mean in terms of VR, I just mean it's Samsung's second WMR model after the Odyssey HMD.

I remember a friend had a PDA with Bluetooth over 15 years ago. It's dumbfounding that after being around for so long it's still such a train wreck even on mainstream products.

If apple made a new protocol called APAN (apple personal area network) where they get rid of all the BS in bluetooth and did it properly, kept it proprietary for 5 years and then released it to the general market, I bet they will sell like hotcakes.

Make AirPods 3 APAN & BT compatible, with the same latency characteristics of theatre wireless mics (really low). Same with the mice & keyboards.

Bruh, they did! They call it „W1 chip“ and its in airpods and beats.

It's still BT inside. The W1 adds some convenient new pairing logic. It's not a new stack.

I have the same problem with bluetooth in my car, it unpairs my phone at random

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