Is bluetooth really this crap?

[d000hg]

I've never liked it but until recently only used it sporadically.

Now I have a couple of bluetooth-equipped speakers/soundbars around the house, and our car stereo too. And my fitbit clone.

I've a modern Android phone and an iPad to connect to these things. And I can rarely think of a time when getting this to work has been quicker or easier than just plugging a cable between them!

Sometimes it is aggressively keen to work... when you turn a speaker on it on it tries to connect to whatever was last using it. So if you left BT turned on on your phone, suddenly the sound 'stops working' until you realise why, and find the bedroom sound system is playing music at random and annoying the wife.

But when you want it to work, it generally refuses to. My phone routinely refuses to connect to speakers unless I forget the device and start again, or walk to the device and press the reset button for a few seconds. Some devices will only connect to my iPad, refuse utterly to work with my phone.

And yet other people just get in their car and their stereo pairs to the phone magically. They use wireless headphones (forced to on the iPhone7) and rave about how great it is.

Am I being old and inept? Maybe I - genuinely - miss the right way of using BT in my naive expectation it's supposed to just work? Or is it genuinely this hopeless? Maybe cheap devices have bad implementations or are iOS-optimised rather than BT being the issue?

[WTFH]

Which Bluetooth devices are you struggling with? You mention your ipad and phone, but not the brand of speakers, make/age of car, etc, or the number of other devices paired to them.


(I have a Bose Bluetooth speaker that is limited to 5 devices, other devices/cars, I'm not sure, they just work)

[d000hg]

I dunno really, without going and looking. Not fancy expensive brands mostly and isn't the point of BT it shouldn't matter... you implement the protocol and it works? Or are cheap ones dubious?

On my small speaker one issue is it has only one button... press to play/pause, long press to re-pair. Used a lot since it invariably pairs with which ever device I don't want to use when turned on Several times I've started my iPad playing music on its local speaker in a different room while trying to get the speaker paired to my phone. Once I didn't find out until hours later my iPad had been playing to itself!

[ladymuck]

I struggle with BT speakers. My Vaio laptop often refuses to connect to my Sony something or other speaker. Although, that tends to be because windoze has decided that it should corrupt the drivers. I tend to find that I have to uninstall and reinstall BT drivers on my laptop every time I want to play music (often too lazy to turn the living room PC on and use the surround sound)

[WTFH]

There's different versions of BT, if you've got a really old item e.g. Running BT 1.0, you might find a new phone running v4 might not pair well with it.

[VectraMan]

I think the answer is yes.

Somebody told me once that Bluetooth isn't a proper standard with proper accreditation, leaving it up to manufacturers to interpret it in their own ways and making interoperability pot luck for the most part. Don't know how true that is.

My phone pairs with my car okay, and at first I'd use it to play music from my phone but I discovered the quality was much better if I used a USB cable and treated the phone as a memory stick. Once I realised that I copied the same files onto a memory stick and used that instead, and haven't bothered with bluetooth since.

[BigRed]

It's that the technology doesn't handle many to many relationships well. If I have some expensive bluetooth headphones I want to use them to multiple sources, TV, Computer, Phone, etc. bluetooth normally tries to pair with the last device used, so if I was watching a movie last night and didn't want to disturb the house the headphones were paired to the TV. This evening everyone is watching some rubbish on the tV so I want to pair with my phone to listen to some music. Turn them on and they pick up the TV and silence the TV sound.

The only simple answer to this seems to be to have one to one relationships so that each device is only paired one other. I've had situations where I've been listening to music from my phone, switched the laptop on and the connection has switched. Multiple connections don't seem to work either, so if I'm listening to a movie on my laptop with noise cancelling headphones it would be nice for them to pick up my phone calls and mute the sound on the movie, but that doesn't happen.

It needs some complex relationships setting up with priorities/sharing and even that assumes the headphones belong to a single user.

[vwdan]

Yep, it's crap - or rather, the implementations generally are. I've got a little Bluetooth adapter that I purchased on a whim that just REFUSES to work with my phone. I actually went as far as resetting the Bluetooth stack completely, but it just won't pair. Every other Bluetooth device works (for the most part) and the adapter works with other phones.

Used to have terrible trouble with the Bluetooth radio that came with my second hand car, too - if you paired too many devices it broke the entire thing and you had to pull the car battery to do a factory reset. It'd drop out whenever it felt like and would occasionally have days where it just didn't work.

[d000hg]

It's that the technology doesn't handle many to many relationships well. If I have some expensive bluetooth headphones I want to use them to multiple sources, TV, Computer, Phone, etc. bluetooth normally tries to pair with the last device used, so if I was watching a movie last night and didn't want to disturb the house the headphones were paired to the TV. This evening everyone is watching some rubbish on the tV so I want to pair with my phone to listen to some music. Turn them on and they pick up the TV and silence the TV sound.

The only simple answer to this seems to be to have one to one relationships so that each device is only paired one other. I've had situations where I've been listening to music from my phone, switched the laptop on and the connection has switched. Multiple connections don't seem to work either, so if I'm listening to a movie on my laptop with noise cancelling headphones it would be nice for them to pick up my phone calls and mute the sound on the movie, but that doesn't happen.

It needs some complex relationships setting up with priorities/sharing and even that assumes the headphones belong to a single user.

This is sounding familiar

Are there any alternatives... just WiFi? I noticed a Sonos advert about how they can let you stream music without getting notification beeps, etc, which would be rather nice.