Andy Edser, hardware writer
This month I’ve been testing: Custom (or customisable) keebs, and a couple of excellent-sounding headsets. Shame one’s Bluetooth only—although it’s reminded me why Bluetooth still isn’t good enough, so there’s always that.
Once you’ve gone wireless, you really don’t want to go back. While my life so often becomes about tangling and then untangling cables for all the hardware I test, when it comes to my personal devices I’ll take wireless wherever I can get it. Not keyboards, obviously. That’s just silly. But for the rest? Wireless is the way of the future.
Proper RF 2.4 GHz wireless, that is. Not Bluetooth. Unfortunately, for so many devices Bluetooth has become the default connection protocol, and my house is full of them. And almost all of them have given me headaches at some point.
Listen to this tale, and see if you recognise your own experiences at any point: You open the box of your brand new Bluetooth device. You pull it from its packaging and roll it around in your hands, pleased that your latest purchase is sleek, refined, and most importantly, cableless. This is the future you were promised as a child.
You might even plug it in for the first time to check if it’s got any battery left after sitting on the shelves, and probably find that it’s got enough to get started with. Life is good. You have a new gadget, and you can’t wait to test it out.
You bring up the Bluetooth devices on your phone, or PC. You hit “pairing”, and do the same on your new equipment. Blue lights start blinking. You are mere moments away from tech nirvana.
So why won’t the effing things talk to each other? You grit your teeth. You hit pairing on both devices again, this time simultaneously, in the hope that this might help. It does not. Your neighbours Bluetooth speaker, bird feeder, and various erotic toys begin showing up in your possible connection list. Your new device does not. Welcome to the Bluetooth equivalent of purgatory, my friends. You may be here for some time.
You try a third time. Still nothing. You howl in anguish. Your vision begins to distort around the edges. Why do I have to repeatedly do this dance every time I… oh, it just connected. Never mind.
If you’re lucky, this will be the end of your woes. However, pairing a device is not, as some Bluetooth advocates will tell you, a mere stutter step in the process. Some Bluetooth gadgets will appear to behave themselves from this point forward—a ploy, as far as I’m concerned, in order to gain your trust.
I have an Anker Soundcore Motion+ Bluetooth speaker. It’s an excellent device, capable of genuinely weighty audio on the move. I keep it mainly in the kitchen, because my partner and I like to listen to playlists, or podcasts, while we cook. Sometimes my partner picks the audio, sometimes I protest so loudly that she lets me take over, because I’m a nightmare to live with like that. Two different phones then, swapping Bluetooth connections.
Except, for reasons I cannot explain, it seems to favour iPhones. So her tawdry Apple device boots my paired connection off at every opportunity it gets, sometimes from other rooms of the house that it would normally struggle to connect to, even when supposedly “forgotten”. Disabling the Bluetooth connection on her phone causes the speaker to intermittently connect to mine unless we both forget it and I re-pair from scratch, and sometimes it won’t allow itself to pair again to either device at all.
Sometimes, mid-listen, it’ll steal the connection from her Bluetooth headphones. Sometimes said headphones will steal the connection from the speaker. Sometimes neither of them will pair with either of our devices.
I would write this off as dodgy Bluetooth receivers on both the speaker and the headphones, or perhaps our phones themselves, except that sometimes all these devices behave themselves and work in complete synergy. For weeks, on occasion.
Again, a ploy for false confidence. It’ll wait until we’ve both had stressful days at work, then make us do the Bluetooth re-pairing dance while we burn the onions. The fact I’ve not yet thrown it through the kitchen window is only testament to my hate-filled, seething desire to make things work the way they’re bloody supposed to.
It’s not the only example. I have a pair of Asus ROG Cetra True Wireless earbuds in for testing, and after picking them up from the office I made the mistake of attempting to use them on the train. I pressed the pairing button, and observed the flashy blue light. Pairing on my phone, activated.
Suddenly, I was treated to the sound of one Mr James Blunt, pulsing through the earbuds in my hand. A horrible shock, I’m sure you can agree, and not one created by my playlist. I would rather eat a James Blunt album than listen to it.
I looked around the carriage in embarrassment. Sitting several seats away, staring out of the window, was a middle-aged woman, tapping her feet and gently swaying in time to the mewling caterwauls of the music. Yep, somehow I’d paired my earbuds to her phone—without her knowledge—at the same time as she was using her own Bluetooth headphones.
I know this woman to be called Jennie. How, you ask? Because my earbuds have now named themselves “Jennie’s ROG CETRA TWS SN”, and even after pairing them to my own phone, I cannot for the life of me figure out how to change it.
I’ve tried forgetting them, resetting them, scouring the settings menus, the lot. Jennie has no idea she owns a pair of Asus wireless gaming earbuds, but I have them in my possession. You’re welcome, Jenster. Come and collect them at any time.
Speaking of gaming, let’s talk lag. Bluetooth has been through multiple iterations now, and some of the newer versions have promised better latency. It’s true, modern Bluetooth earbuds and headsets have much less lag than the earlier models.
It’s still there though, and as someone that can’t unsee badly synced audio once I’ve noticed it, it’s a pain. There are some mitigating tools in action here that can make it better, like YouTube videos deliberately desyncing themselves to line the video back up with the audio. But for gaming? It’s still not great.
This month I’ve reviewed the Heavys H1H headphones, which only offer wired and Bluetooth connection options. They’re a Bluetooth 5.1 set of cans, and in combination with a 5.3 receiver it’s not a terrible experience. But a proper, proprietary dongle-based RF connection is still the way to go, with Bluetooth being its poor gaming cousin.
As for Bluetooth mice, game controllers, etc? Nah, not if a regular RF connection is a usable option. They’re fine for very casual stuff, but as soon as things get competitive, I’d rather have the solid reliability and makes-no-difference latency of a proper 2.4 GHz connection.
There’s a new version on the horizon though, and that’s Bluetooth 6. Promising better tracking, more reliable and accurate connection pairing, less redundant connection attempts and lower latency, it sounds—on paper at least—like it might fix all my issues.
I bet it won’t, though. My life is destined to be cursed eternally by malfunctioning, laggy and irritating Bluetooth devices, and the universe is just too inherently unfair to relieve me from my torment this easily. Curse you, Bluetooth connection standard. We are destined to do battle forevermore.
