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Comment by markpeppers | Hacker News Reader

Someone had to link this, guess I’ll go ahead. https://xkcd.com/2055/

This 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.

This is evidence that Bluetooth is a mischievous entity. The range is terrible unless better range will cause problems.

I just use an aux cord into the headphone jack. Easy peasy.

Finding a phone with a headphone jack that isn't some low end garbage is becoming harder and harder each year.

I'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?

In truth, I use a USB-C/Lightning-to-3.5mm adapter. It lives on the car's aux cord.

does someone sell one of these that survives more than 10 disconnect cycles now?

No. 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.

Just 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...

> some brand called Insignia

Isn't that just Best Buy's store brand?

I've been happy with my Ugreen 3.5mm+charge adapter for about six months now. It looks rather dumb but works perfectly.

You can always use a lightning/usb-c to 3.5mm cable.

Reminds 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.

Just 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.

Makes sense. Will try if we run into this again. Thanks!

In 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.

Agreed - or "simply" a UI that shows "Multiple favorite devices detected - which should I pick?"

That could show for 10 seconds or something and then pick whatever the default would have been.

In this case, I think it's a mix of both the car and the phone picking favorites, and my phone loses the toss every time because of some setting that I couldn't seem to find.

When I turn my car on, no, I don't want Bluetooth to autoconnect, and play music on full volume.

Thank 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.

I 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.

My 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... :-)

I 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.

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