Bluetooth is (too) Hard

I recently purchased a Motorola "T505":http://direct.motorola.com/hellomoto/t505/ Bluetooth speaker phone for my car. It works well enough, but there are these little annoyances that get in the way of truly seamless use. Sometimes my phone will get "stuck" in a mode where it thinks it is still connected to the speakerphone long after I have walked away. The speakerphone refuses to play audio when the phone is in "silent" mode. Sometimes the call pickup or disconnect functions don't work quite right, and so on. Interestingly, I've noticed these sort of annoyances since the beginning with Bluetooth based products. There are very, very few Bluetooth connections that "just work" and continue to do so. On top of that, the model is fairly complex: many people probably don't understand all of the subtleties of "discover," "pair," "passcode," and "authorize." I don't think any of these concepts are super difficult, but it seems that almost no implementation gets everything right, and I think that is a clue to an underlying problem. "Bluetooth":http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluetooth as a specification seems to be very complex for real humans to implement well. It has been around for about a decade, so by this point the basics should be very mature, and I'm sure they are. But all of these annoyances indicate to me that maybe important parts of the specification are too complex or poorly defined. It's easy to point fingers are the implementations and just say that the chip vendors or driver writers or operating system engineers made mistakes. It's also easy to say the the user interface designers did a poor job of integrating the technology into the user experience. All of those engineers are undoubtedly guilty of making mistakes -- they (we) always do. Unfortunately with some technologies it just seems easier than otherwise to stumble.

Comments

[T505]

Do you have an email address that we can use to talk about your T505 experience?

[David Creemer]

Sure -- I'm happy to give some feedback on the product, if that's what you're after. I'll contact you.