you know what really burns my popcorn bluetooth i mean sure it's convenient
and those little wireless speakers are super handy but i've got a lot of
problems with bluetooth and now
you're gonna hear about them first off guess which frequency band bluetooth
uses surely it couldn't be 2.4 gigahertz
right you know the same one that every wi-fi router blasts out a signal on
making the band more clogged than a toilet at chipotle oh wait yeah that's
exactly what frequency it uses so from the get-go your little bluetooth devices
are already competing with tons of other wireless traffic which can reduce your
effective range but hey i'm just getting started why exactly is bluetooth so
range limited in the first place look i know that whenever you're using
something wireless there's a trade-off between range and battery life since
blasting a signal farther away sucks down more power but what good is long
battery life if i'm constantly having to worry if i'm too far away from my
bluetooth speaker i mean sure sometimes it's not a big deal but i
don't want the signal to be so anemic that it just drops out if i take my
phone into the other room because a few sheets of drywall are in the way come on
oh and while we're talking about drop-offs let's move on to another
common source of frustration pairing issues you'd think they could have made
this simple like wi-fi your gadget sees another gadget like your phone and your
router do and they just they just connect they just do it but no
instead you have to take the extra step of putting your devices in discovery
mode before they can see each other turns out that unlike wi-fi where you
can usually just see a network automatically you can't do this with
bluetooth unless you have some optional additional technology strapped on like a
pair of nfc transmitters and once you deal with that you get another headache
because the powers that be created bluetooth profiles one for streaming
music one for phone calls one for connecting your computer mouse and so on
and while i get the reason they did this was to save battery life here's the
problem none of these things have been tested to play nicely with each other which is why
sometimes your car's infotainment system will work better with your phone than it
does with your friends and to make matters worse newer devices use what's
called smart bluetooth where they don't even have to support every feature in a
certain profile while this is again supposed to extend battery life by
allowing a gadget to turn off features it's not using it makes it even more
likely that a pairing problem will arise because of all these random profile
combos you also have the fact that some bluetooth devices are supposed to be
able to connect to multiple other gadgets at once but are so low power
that their little embedded processors can't handle the extra traffic resulting
in even more dropouts but now i'd like to talk about an issue
that absolutely drives me nuts when i'm trying to watch video
latency whenever i'm watching a great episode of tech wiki with bluetooth
speakers or headphones it's like watching a badly dubbed kung fu movie
because the audio track is so out of sync and the basic reason this happens
is because bluetooth has relatively low data rates yet again to preserve battery
life and hopefully improve range meaning the audio data takes a little longer to
reach your wireless speakers or headphones than it would with a wired solution your devices also have to do
extra processing which is often inefficient because many operating
systems Android haven't been well optimized for
quickly dealing with bluetooth audio i mean imagine that a wireless device
hasn't been optimized for a wireless audio standard are you kidding me and
yet they took away our headphone jacks who's in charge here and yes i know
there are codecs like optics adaptive that are supposed to cut down on latency
but it's often still noticeable due to core issues with the bluetooth spec
whatever operating system your device is using and the inherent limitations of
wireless audio if the powers that be haven't optimized audio by now it
probably isn't surprising that bluetooth is also notorious for not being the most
secure wireless protocol either as the myriad ways it has been implemented has
made it tough for the industry to come together and figure out how to lock it
down not to mention it's had tons of vulnerabilities surfaced since it was
first released so is there any way to make your bluetooth
experience a little better well
the best things you can do are to keep all of your bluetooth devices up to date
and disable any features you won't be using in your device settings doing both
of these things can cut down potentially
on frustrating pairing problems otherwise
maybe just use wired devices unless you really need bluetooth i mean having your
headphones connected to your phone with a wire and a dongle is that it's not
that big of a deal guys come on
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slash techwiki well that's it for this one guys thanks for watching like the
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