Why does Bluetooth still not work the way it should?

Anybody who knows me knows that I have been a supporter and promoter of Bluetooth technology since it first started to poke its head above the parapet, way back in 1998. But there is an elephant in my room, and its tusks are blue! Despite all the good work that the Bluetooth SIG and all its responsible member companies have done, it is still the case that Bluetooth phones, headsets etc sometimes don't work the way they should.

Example - I use a Nokia N96 with a Jabra JX20 headset - both high-end products from respected companies. The two are paired and work OK on first connection. But, if I go out of range, or switch the headset off for some reason, they then will not reconnect. I have to switch the headset off and re-boot the phone. In a given day this can happen several times. Most frustrating.

After 11 years of Bluetooth development, and with two products from a couple of the most respected manufacturers, this really shouldn't be happening. And this isn't isolated. A lot of kit passes through our hands, and similar things happen all the time. I'm in the industry, so I keep using this kit, but what will consumers be thinking?

I've put the question to the wireless community, and Peter Hauser, CEO of The Quality Factory came back with these observations?

I'm surprised nobody is willing to comment here!

Your question: "Why does Bluetooth still not work the way it should?" is more a question about "Quality" than it is about "Conformance to the Bluetooth standard" and therein lies the problem...

First of-all, there will always be a struggle between innovation and conformance to a standard. Every company wants, and needs to innovate. This implies that every company seeks to use the standards in new and interesting ways, and when they do, they make "assumptions" as to how other, compatible products, will react, thus creating the first problem...

For instance, the Bluetooth standards speak little about timing tolerances for commands and responses (beyond the standard timeouts). Some devices can respond very quickly to a command, while others cannot. If, however, a device is EXPECTING a delayed response and instead receives a very rapid one, if the firmware is intolerant, it could cause the device to lock-up.

Also - the Bluetooth standards do not currently address most multi-profile scenarios. It is only recently that the common "HFP, HSP, A2DP, and AVRCP" in a single device scenario was examined more closely for integration into the specifications AND the play/pause behavior (you know, where Play means Play, and Pause means Pause) has changed between the whitepaper and the specifications.

In short, unless companies are willing to invest in clarifying and standardizing their assumptions, these types of problems will continue.

And then, there's the issue of QUALITY.

With Bluetooth technology's pull towards commoditization, this complex technology is now in the hands of implementers who don't understand its intricacies and are building products based on new assumptions. Couple that with reduced development budgets for commodity products, and you have all of the makings of a reduction in product quality.

Teams are no longer "expected" to attend such events as UPF and to conduct extensive interoperability tests. Instead, they are expected to keep development budgets as low as possible.

All the while, new platforms are opening-up APIs that enable 3rd party applications to affect the Bluetooth performance. For instance, a mobile phone may have three separate music players on it. If one of those music players interacts with the Bluetooth A2DP/AVRCP (music) stack in an unexpected fashion, it could damage otherwise solid interoperability with wireless stereo headsets.

So - I guess the answer to your very simple question is quite complex.

If companies are going to do a really good job making their solutions "work" in the real world, they need to take the time to understand the assumptions made by products that already exist in the marketplace (of which there are many), find the similarities in these assumptions, and design accordingly.

Then, they need to TEST, TEST, and TEST again.

Thanks, Peter. Other contributions on this topic are very welcome. In the meantime, I may just have to change my own gadgets on a more often basis to check whether this situation is getting better, or worse.

After all, a Nokia N96 has been around for quite a while now ....

Which smartphone would Paris Hilton use?

After all, we all like to think we are as smart and sophisticated as celebs like Paris Hilton, Michael Jackson, Stephen Fry (http://www.stephenfry.com/ for the non-English out there, he is something of a local phenomenon), don't we?

You can debate that in your own time, but the fact is that it is time to change my phone. For approaching 5 years I have been a Nokia man - N81 (good, showed promise), N95 (excellent, wish I was still using it) and currently an N96 (awful - hangs all the time, terrible Bluetooth installation).

I have resisted the temptation of receiving email on my phone up until now, but I think it is time to bite the bullet. I am a sucker for phones with lots and lots of features, or smartphones as the world knows them, so the choice for me comes down to these: Nokia N97 (offers loads of promise, fantastic camera, but I really don't want another experience like the N96), a Blackberry (sooo good at mobile email and better at the other stuff too now, but do I really want to join the chino and polo shirt brigade?) or, of course, an iPhone.

Every person I know who has an iPhone LOVES IT. Everybody that has a Blackberry respects it. I don't know anybody with an N97 at the moment so this is a bit hard to gauge. I know that I will find an iPhone a joy to use, and it has good Bluetooth now, with stereo music streaming. I may well wish I had moved lock, stock and two smoking touchscreens to the Apple family years ago. But the iPhone won't play Flash content, which is a bit frustrating.

If I buy a Blackberry I will no doubt get the job done but will lose interest in the sexy gadget that I carry around me.

If the N97 is as 'hangy' as the N96, it will end up thrown against the wall.

None of the options comes without financial outlay, so the decision needs thought on many levels. What sort of a phone user do I want to appear to be? A style-driven ubercoolmonkey iPhone user? A guy who is worrying about whether his PowerPoint slides are ready for his next presentation? Or the guy picking up the shattered remains of his latest gadget acquisition?

So, let's go back to the beginning: which would Paris Hilton choose? Oh yes .... The one that is available with a pink cover and covered with more Swarovski crystals than there are barnacles on a Thames barge.

Sigh ... Maybe I will put the decision off for a while.

Twitter versus Facebook face-off

I was recently encouraged, for business reasons, to increase my web presence. I have been on several networking sites for some years – Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/vince.holton, LinkedIn (http://www.linkedin.com/in/vinceholton), My Space – but I’ve never done much with them. I’m now also on Twitter (http://www.twitter.com/vholton). I made a conscious decision to put more time into all of the sites. It is working so far, my connections on all the sites are growing. Well, with the exception of MySpace. I’m not really doing anything with that at all, hence no link above.

So far, and bear in mind I am something of an arriviste in these circles, my assessment is this. Twitter dominates. With 100+ people following me after just more than a week, and about the same in the opposite direction, Twitter traffic, via the very handy TweetDeck application, is fairly constant. So far, it seems that 95% of Twitter traffic is nonsense, and of little or no value. Having said that, the 5% that remains is often interesting and sometimes useful, and as an alternative IM mechanism, it works. But - I often do want to challenge those Tweeters that endlessly just post the same links, all day long. Get a life, people!

Facebook is without doubt more about maintaining social – family and friends – connections. And it is good from that point of view. Courtesy of Facebook, for example, I’m now in contact with two members of my family that I haven’t seen or spoken to for decades. Facebook is useful.

LinkedIn is about business. I have been on LinkedIn for many years and not done much other than the occasional profile update. I’m now much more active, and have my own discussion group – WPAN World (http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=2136483&trk=hb_side_g) – and this is paying dividends. I am building a large group of contacts that have real value for my primary business, which is my Incisor brand – an eMagazine and Internet TV business (www.incisor.tv).

So, in terms of direct benefit to my business, I view LinkedIn as the most relevant. Facebook is a nice site to be on, but for my B2B business, I am not sure of the value. Twitter? Well, I really have not made my mind up about that. It is a fact that I spend the most time engaged in Twitter-related communications. Is it a business tool? I don’t know yet. I’d be interested to hear your thoughts.


Real world testing
UK TV has a programme called The Gadget Show. I shouldn’t need to explain what it is about. In last week’s programme they addressed the Facebook versus Twitter question with a face-off. The programme’s two presenters, Jason Bradbury and Gail Porter, who are both well-known proper, genuine minor celebrities thanks to their TV careers, were set the challenge of attracting as many people as possible to a free to attend event in central London that was to take place 5 days after the start of the challenge. This was an opportunity for everyday punters (that’s ordinary folk) to appear on TV. Not the sort of opportunity that normally takes a lot of selling.

Bradbury was to use Twitter to get people to come along, Porter was to use Facebook. Both had already been dedicated users of the two sites. The person who enticed the most people along to the event would be the winner.

Remember that these are two reasonably high-profile people with lots of friends, and this was guaranteed TV coverage for the men, women and children of our unwashed masses. And the two competitors both used all of the tricks of the social networking trade and put a lot of time into it.

And who won, and which social networking site was more effective? Well, it was Bradbury and Twitter. But the actual numbers achieved were surprisingly small. Bradbury’s Twitter campaign brought 208 and Porter’s Facebook campaign brought just 23 people. So Twitter was much more effective at getting a message to more people quickly.

There are still people out there that insist that Facebook as well as Twitter can be as useful to my business as I can easily see that LinkedIn is.

I’ve just got to work out how to make it so. Do you know?