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Has phone pairing proven too challenging to do via bluetooth?
Now, there is no reason to fear missing on personalized ads recommended just for you, since sharing the same portable phone number across all devices means that it doesn't matter what logins you use or don't use--you can be conveniently identified via one handy identification number.
http://www.theverge.com/2015/10/14/9529869/att-numbersync-connected-devices-shared-phone-number
Is this a service people believe they have been missing out on?
I personally find that pairing via bluetooth with my car is as simple as turning on bluetooth on my phone and being within 20 feet of my car--but the AT&T executive in question believes most people find this to be challenging to set up. His solution: Give the car your phone number. The same goes for any wearables you have, tablets, and your PC.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by RedBear on Monday October 19 2015, @08:03AM
This submission smacks strongly of someone with a glass-completely-empty attitude in a world half-full/half-empty glasses. It also smacks of someone who mistakenly believes they're much smarter than everyone else and can't see why anyone else might want something they can't perceive a need for.
That's nice. But that's not "pairing" Bluetooth, Mr. Sarcastic P. Smartypants. That's just letting successfully-paired Bluetooth devices reconnect to each other by bringing them into close enough proximity. Pairing Bluetooth devices is such a fabulously unintuitive process in many cases that most people still have to consult the tiny manual that comes with the device to be sure they're doing it correctly. "OK, I hold down this button for 8 seconds and then both the red and blue lights should start flashing, then I have 30 seconds to pair it with my phone. Wait, why is only the red light flashing? Now it turned itself off. WTF?" Then, if you're not lucky you get to spend the next half an hour trying to figure out why it's still not working even though it's supposedly successfully paired. I have not been impressed in the slightest with the abilities of many Bluetooth devices to successfully pair or reconnect when they're supposed to. Many Bluetooth devices are even known to simply not be compatible with each other or to have various issues when used together. So you can keep the smug attitude, tyvm.
Now let's look at the fact that your Bluetooth devices are only extensions of your phone. In other words, if you forget or lose your phone, your Bluetooth device becomes relatively useless. If your phone isn't present, your Bluetooth equipped car won't be able to stream any of your music or act as a speakerphone to make or receive calls or do any of the other convenient things it could have done if it was connected to your phone. It can't download its own software updates or provide you with live traffic updates while you drive. Which is why Tesla's vehicles have their own built-in SIM and data plan. The natural extension of this is to simply add a voice plan and then use the same phone number to make and receive calls from the car itself, whether your phone is present and "paired" or not. My, how convenient. Your car also potentially has a much better cellular antenna attached to it, which can provide a much better range and signal strength in poor coverage areas, without having to invest in and install an expensive 3rd-party cellular repeater system.
Ads aren't targeted to your phone number. They're targeted to YOU, using unique hardware IDs that are cooperatively tied to your actual identity a thousand different ways through a thousand different tiny bits of information collected by thousands of different companies and agencies and even through big-data analysis of your uniquely identifiable usage/browsing patterns. You have to go through superspy level hoops in order to do anything online that won't eventually be trackable right back to you. If you think you're avoiding any targeted ads because you have two different phone numbers instead of one, well, you're a bit deluded about exactly how difficult it is to escape the identification system that's been created.
The submitter has completely misunderstood the point, and potential convenient uses, of syncing the same phone number to multiple mobile devices. Bluetooth was only ever meant to be a PAN (personal area network), it was not meant to connect a device to any LAN/WAN. Even with my limited imagination I can see many different possible reasons someone might want to use to same number on different devices, and/or have devices that are able to operate more independently of each other by having their own direct connection to the WAN. Although the difficulty of pairing Bluetooth devices might be one of the reasons mentioned to promote the idea, I think that has very little to do with why people might want such a feature. Bluetooth would remain as a complementary technology for close-quarters communication between devices.
By the way this is kind of already being done, in recent versions of iOS at least, with their features that let you send and receive iMessages on multiple devices using the same iMessage ID, and a newer feature allowing you to make and answer calls from a Mac or iPad or iPhone that is associated with the same iCloud ID. My wife and I have both had iPhones with different phone numbers for several years and always shared the same iCloud ID for the convenience of sharing auto-syncing apps, music, notes, contacts, reminders, etc. When we upgraded to iOS 8 our phones suddenly started to both ring when anyone would call either phone, and we could answer each other's phone calls. As usual with Apple this was a feature that was enabled by default and it was quite confusing to figure out why my iPhone kept ringing and people kept asking for her when I was at home, because they had actually called her iPhone while she was at work miles away. I at first thought this was a feature that would only work when the two devices were together on the same LAN, but that's not how it seems to work. I disabled it.
Anyway, lots of people seem to love these features and put them to good use, and if someone hadn't requested them they probably wouldn't exist.
¯\_ʕ◔.◔ʔ_/¯ LOL. I dunno. I'm just a bear.
... Peace out. Got bear stuff to do. 彡ʕ⌐■.■ʔ
(Score: 2) by mmcmonster on Monday October 19 2015, @10:17AM
Agree with above, for the most part.
My dad's a pretty smart guy. A couple weeks ago he had me come over to pair his new cell phone with his car. The car just wasn't giving him the option to pair a phone and no error message why that was the case.
Turns out the car is ~8-10 years old and has memory to remember 8 bluetooth devices. Between him, my mom, and my younger brother, they had already used up all 8 slots and the car was silently failing. Once I deleted all the old entries, we were good as gold.
Now here's the problem: AT&T's solution would NOT have fixed the problem for us. Because in order to do so, the car would have it's own (private) cell number which would have been forwarded to my dad's number.
In other words, AT&T wants all cars to be cellular receivers and presumably charge them a service fee for that.
(Score: 2) by opinionated_science on Monday October 19 2015, @12:08PM
if you want your car to have a cheap cell service, get a cheap mobile phone. Remove the battery. Hook the power up to the car 12V via USB charging or whatever.
Car turns ignition on, phone boots. Cell service.
You probably want a pretty cheap phone, maybe one of the old nokias..;-)
(Score: 2) by Hyperturtle on Monday October 19 2015, @03:39PM
Hi Redbear,
I appreciate your candid comments.
I use sarcasm to insert humor into things; it isn't always necessary but it can be hard to turn it off sometimes. I have to admit that part of approach was to get people thinking and posting--I am glad I was able to encourage both, even if I was a bit of a turn off.
Setting my humor aside (and hopefully, the snark as well), here is my response to your thoughts. Note that I am not fundamentally altering or otherwise changing what my subject matter was. I again appreciate your reply!! Although... perhaps it is disappointing that it wasn't to give me a +5 star modifier for being a genius with brilliant comic satire. Sometimes... I don't write to hear my own voice in my head, but to hear others when I read what they say. Which in itself is egotisical. That said, than you for replying. The discourse is valuable, I think, and I hope you agree.
---
My major concern about the technology being proffered up can be divided into a few fears:
Loss of control due to someone elses' preferences
Being billed for that loss of control, or being unable to pay to get it back
Being told to pick a different vendor if I don't like it
And, having chosen what I chose because I liked or tolerated or had been forced to accept it -- and having it change anyway.
Having no way to revert back to the previous control I had, regardless of what I pay
And finally, ending up with a product I did not pay for or otherwise is significantly different than what I bought, without recourse to get back what I originally had.
I will pay for conveniences, and seek them out, but I get upset when I am paying for conveniences I do not want or can't control or disable or change or otherwise prove to be inconvenient to me... and of course, are forced on me.
Speaking of features, I would hope that this sort of thing... would be free. Or that eventually will be.
Remember when GPS cost $10 a month and was limited to 5 or 10 uses, and then it was $1 per map lookup?
Or that Bluetooth pairing was, at a cost, Per Device, when Verizon introduced it. The Verizon firmware disabled such features on their phones unless enabled by customer service! The phone hackers of the era were enabling the bluetooth services available on the phone, but disabled by Verizon. You had to replace files in the system folder to alter the firmware image and enable the features that otherwise were pushed by Verizon OTA.
Or that the use of a USB cable to sync data off a smart phone was a $30 feature. I recall Motorola charged for a "data kit" which was a disk with a Windows driver and a USB cable.
And... Verizon did not always even offer the feature as something to pay for -- I recall their early smart phones had features that simply could not be used on Verizon because they didn't have a fee structure for transmitting files [not contacts, but mp3s or camera pictures] via bluetooth. Yet the hardware on the phones supported it, and were even to be found in the advertisements. Very soon thereafter we all started to learn that different carriers had different models of phones that could do different things, for promotional or tie-in reasons, not technical ones.
If you didn't hack your phone to wirelessly sync in those days, then you could at least take the SIM out, boot into E911 mode, then quickly sync via bluetooth and drag and drop files one by one on the source device. In fact, that was how one was able to enable the other features by dragging those files into the bootup folder. I guess rooting today is no different, but we're still hackers for trying to exert control over the native capabilities of the devices. (For good or for ill)
Hopefully you see where I am going, because I am looking back at where we came from with an eye on the prices imposed onto us in the future.
Paying $5 or $10 a month to associate my phone number to devices--this doesn't seem like a risk that affect those concerns. However, my experiences have dictated that scope creep happens... and once a profit model is established, it can be difficult to move away from.
Who is to say that what is free to sync via bluetooth today, regardless of the challenges, will cost $5 to $10 to set up as a one-time fee? Or yearly? Or monthly? Or not be available because this is the replacement? New models of phones may prevent such pairing without the new phone number association service... which sounds a like like what Verizon used to do with bluetooth peripherals.
But, I could be wrong -- it could be easier and secure and inexpensive. We may be able to pick more than two! Hopefully, I have explained my concerns adequately. Please let me know...
(Score: 2) by RedBear on Monday October 19 2015, @06:01PM
I'm glad you take my criticism in a positive way. As it was meant, of course.
I believe I understand what you're saying. You've experienced some pretty obnoxious behavior from cell phone companies. I was fortunate to have only a cheap Nokia and a Motorola, briefly, which had nothing fancy about them that I needed to pay extra for. Then I had no cell phone for quite some time. And then came the iPhone. One of the most wonderful things about the iPhone, and why it is so popular, is because Apple from the beginning never gave in to the cell phone companies' greedy desires to have control over the firmware on the phone. Most providers still charge for tethering and don't allow it on unlimited data accounts, but jailbreaking the iPhone can fix even that problem.
But we've (mostly) moved past the era when the phone companies were able to overcharge for miscellaneous BS like "Bluetooth pairing" or usage of the GPS chip that they never should have been capable of charging for in the first place. They were able to do that because they had control of the operating system, as they unfortunately still do on the Android devices they sell. The iPhone has never suffered from that problem.
The article you linked to states that the feature won't cost anything beyond the $10 fee that is already required to add a tablet to a mobile data share plan with AT&T. It sounds like it's going to be just like the new "Wi-Fi Calling" feature I just activated a few days ago, which came with the upgrade to iOS 9 and costs me nothing extra but now allows me to make and receive cellular calls much more easily at my house where there is terrible cellular reception. It's a free, voluntary feature that is meant to help AT&T compete with its rivals who are also offering the same feature. I don't see how they could justify forcing any customer to activate the feature or pay for something they don't want activated.
In short, as I said before, I see your viewpoint as a bit too glass-completely-empty and advise you to move towards a glass-half-empty approach to life. And vote against any politician who is in favor of any further mergers in the telecommunications industry. Or they will be able to bring back exactly the sort of insanity you describe.
¯\_ʕ◔.◔ʔ_/¯ LOL. I dunno. I'm just a bear.
... Peace out. Got bear stuff to do. 彡ʕ⌐■.■ʔ
(Score: 2) by CoolHand on Tuesday October 20 2015, @02:01AM
(editor's note: we actually couldn't find the article he linked to.. I found the closest/best thing to it that I could find and inserted that link)
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