I Don’t Want Flying Cars; I Just Want Working Bluetooth
I love Bluetooth. I love that it’s supported on all my various electronic gadgets, and lets them talk to each other and exchange information, be it streaming audio data, or a text note, or what have you.
Or at least I love the idea of Bluetooth. The unfortunate reality is that the implementations that I’ve seen never quite live up to the ideal.
For instances, it often takes several attempts to pair two devices, even when they’re two feet from each other. Sometimes devices disconnect for no obvious reason, or seem to become unpaired without me doing anything.
And then there’s the stuttering, which might be related. I have yet to find a Bluetooth headset, speaker, or other audio receiver that doesn’t stutter for five minutes until it finds it groove. In fairness, after the initial five minutes, things tend to stay pretty stable (at least until I, say, move my phone five feet further from the speaker, at which point, they need to resync). But if it’s a matter of the two devices negotiating, I don’t know, frequencies and data throttling rates and protocols, why don’t they do it at the beginning? Or is it a TCP thing, where the two start out using little bandwidth and ramping up over time?
Lastly, there are the tunnel-vision implementations. From what I’ve seen, the Bluetooth standard defines roles that each device can play, e.g., “I can play audio”, “I can dial a phone number”, “I can display an address card”, “I can store files”, and so forth. But in practice, that doesn’t always work: my cell phone sees my desk phone as an earpiece, and earpieces can’t handle address cards, don’t be silly, so I can’t copy my cell phone’s contact list to my desk phone.
In the age of the Internet of Things, my desk phone can store contacts, my TV can run a browser, and pretty soon my toaster will be able to share its 5G hotspot with the neighborhood. There’s no reason to be limited by a noun on the box it came in.
I understand that most of the above is likely caused by bad implementation of a fundamentally decent protocol. But Bluetooth has been around for, what, a decade or more? And I still regularly run into these problems. That points to something systemic in the software community.
My experiences have been rather better. While the infotainment systems in automobiles are still a completely lost cause, I’ve had no problems with either my old BT earwig nor the somewhat newer BT headset. They paired to my phones without complaint, routinely connect without drama and stay connected without difficulty even if I leave the phone on the kitchen counter while I go move laundry between the bedroom and basement.