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Bluetooth Battery Level Indicators May Soon Be Coming To Android (androidandme.com)
The folks over at XDA Developers are reporting that Android may be getting a new feature that could help users identify how much battery life is remaining in their Bluetooth wireless headphones. The feature for "[retrieving] battery level information of [a] remote device" was discovered in the Android Open Source Project (AOSP). Android and Me reports: This hasn't made it to final release just yet, but when it does, it will make it easy for users to quickly ascertain how much battery life is remaining in the Bluetooth headphones that are connected to their device. It doesn't just mean support for Bluetooth headphones, either, as Bluetooth speakers and other accessories that run on battery power will be supported, too. Unfortunately there's no telling on when this feature will see the light of day for the public. There's no set timeframe between a feature that's part of the AOSP and rolling out in a final, public release of the mobile operating system. Some manufacturers have already built support for this feature into their phones, including OnePlus, Samsung, and LG. So while it might not be a completely brand new feature on Android, it would still be good for the Android platform as a whole to support the feature in the stock build.
so not sure how this is news except maybe it'll be implemented at the OS level.
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Talk about an over-engineered solution to a self-created problem.
One of the (many) things I am loving about my Beats X is my iPhone telling me the exact battery percentage on both.
Is this a feature that was lost at some point? I have a crappy bluetooth speaker a friend bought me one time or another (it's called a Durapod if it matters). I'm 99% sure it's a rather old bluetooth standard (~3?), and it's always shown a battery meter in the notification tray (Android 4.4.4 & 6.0.1).
Now it's accuracy is a whole other matter, but again, it was like $30 at BestBuy so I'm pretty sure that parts normal. Come to think of it, I have some crappy near forgotten Mpow work out headphones that are BT and I think they do this too... But my expensive Plantronics (that have BT4 and NFC) don't...
Sex. Drugs, and Unix.
Who currently owns the patent for remote sensing of battery charge using an API?
Surely one exists?
I have a bluetooth stereo I pair with my phone. Whenever I do this my phone is plugged in.
What I want is for my phone to access my NAS, which has something like 200 gig of music, not just the paltry amount on my phone that gets listened to when I exercise.
Yeah, I know I can buy a bluetooth dongle for my laptop, and I can spend money for an app that may or may not work well on my phone, but jeez. It's a droid. It's got WiFi. It's got Bluetooth. Why can't it access my damned NAS and send it to my bluetooth speakers?
Power consumption? Did I mention whenever I do this my phone is plugged into a nuclear power plant? Ooops they shut San Onofre down. Guess I'm sucking power out of some rich dude's Tesla charging experience. Whatever.
And the crowd goes mild.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
There is a "battery service" defined in the standard.
(At least for BLE, aka Bluetooth Smart, but I assume also for Bluetooth Proper, as well.)
While nobody is forced to implement it, or implement it correctly, It's there - and built into the software development kits for the Systems On a Chip. If your device uses a common coin cell and the default power handling, you can just turn it on in the build and have it in your application - and any Bluetooth (or BLE) central can use it.
The BLE one gives you its best guess of the percentage of battery life remaining as a number from 0 10 100.
Now some batteries (for instance, Lithium Thionyl Chloride) can't be measured accurately (or at all before the last 15% of their lifetime). So battery services for them tend to hand you bogus numbers, if there isn't a "gas guage" chip counting switching regulator cycles, and thus electrons, to make a halfway decent guess. But that approach gets less accurate as end-of-life approaches, when you really want it to get better as you approach the wall.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Works with all my BT devices. I guess it's standard or something now?
I mean seriously, why would I need bluetooth headphones? You need to text me that shit.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
I dont like the idea of dumping everything into os. The code should be distributed and even not crap up the phone-display of connected devices. The connected devices should self contained like have an small line of led indicators for the same.
iOS has had this feature for quite a while now ***ducks for cocer***
As this article https://www.theguardian.com/te... in the Guardian reported almost exactly one year ago to the day, it is possible to use "side channel data" such as battery life to track a user between different web sites. Unfortunately, that tracking capability only exists if the user is internet-connected at the time...
Similarly, the ability to track a mobile device via a wifi transponder is only possible if the device has wifi enabled.
So what we have here is a new tracking vector, since now we have the means to track someone via a bluetooth emission that a device on their person might make. Of course, the range of bluetooth means that this is only really viable in say a commercial environment like a department store, or a shopping mall, or similar.
Yet another case of someone adding a feature without stopping to think about how it could be subverted or used against the owner of the device that supports it.