Let’s Make Bluetooth Great Again!

Ah bluetooth.  A technology many of us have a love/hate relationship with.  In its early days, it was a tiresome annoyance getting 2 devices to simply communicate.  Remember typing in 0000 for the pair code just to have it fail?  

It appears that one of the positives that’s coming with the death of the headphone jack (thanks Apple!), is that Bluetooth pairing and general usage will not only be necessary, but more convenient.  Apple has it’s W1 chip which was super slick when announced, allowing easy pairing to their wireless buds from the moment you flicked open the case they charged in, but it looks like we will soon have a similar feature on Android phones and hopefully other devices as well.

Android devices running 6.0 and above will soon have the “Fast Pair” feature enabled, which takes advantage of Bluetooth Low Energy and your phones location to automatically pop up a notification on your phone with the device image and an option to pair.  How convenient!  Your phone will even ask if you want to grab the companion app from the Play Store if it has one.  The downside is that the bluetooth headphones/speaker needs to support it…so only a handful of hardware can do this now.

I’ve always wanted to have a “tap and pair” feature for Bluetooth devices.  I even went as far as utilizing NFC stickers and placing it on or near my various speakers so I could easily connect to the device I wanted to listen to music on.  I also had Tasker audibly announce what it was connected to!  Now, this is not that, and I’m still sad about the death of the headphone jack, but if that is what it takes to push technology forward, then great!  

To see more details on how this works, and what devices currently support it, check out the source link here:  https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2017/10/announcing-fast-pair-effortless.html