Bluetooth Headsets

As many of you A2DP (high-quality audio) freaks know and also been pointed out in my dedicated articles (last, iPhoneMVP-frontpaged one HERE), full AVRCP hasn’t been supported on the (otherwise, A2DP-capable) iPod touches and iPod’s, not even as of the latest, just-released 3.1.3 firmware.

LG makes a phone called the Envy, but the LG phone that I've always envied is the Decoy.  The LG Decoy has a snap-on Bluetooth earpiece that always goes with the phone.  It's a novel concept that we iPhone users couldn't take advantage of.  Now, there's a headset for that!

You may well remember that, immediately after the release of OS 3.0 and the 3G S, I’ve published quite a few tests on stereo Bluetooth (A2DP) headphones compatibility with both the iPhone 3G and the 3G S (see THIS for my latest report).

Now that version 3.1.2 is out and I had some time to research how it can be safely jailbroken, I’ve re-run the tests, particularly in order to find out how voice control over Bluetooth works.

AT&T may have royally messed up the Bluetooth A2DP support in their firmware - after all, they've removed BT tethering; during this, they may have also (without their knowing about it – after all, evaluating A2DP quality needs some practice, which they may not have at all) messed up A2DP in some way.

UPDATE (06/26/2009): In the meantime, another, major problem has been found out: the encoding lag. See the just-added UPDATE section in the original article.
 

Originally written: Unfortunately, there are two major problems with the stereo Bluetooth (A2DP) support of iPhone OS 3.

1.) Many of you have already posted the previous/next remote controls not working. This, unfortunately, is a fundamental problem with the AVRCP implementation of OS3. Hope they’ll fix it in a next update.

2.) I’ve found a very hard-to-track and really annoying problem.

I’ve finished (thoroughly) testing my six A2DP headphones with the new Bluetooth stereo support of iPhone OS 3.0 (OS3 for short), along with their traditional mobile phone headset functionality.


(the stereo headphones, all paired with my iPhone)


(in-call view: as can be seen, you can dynamically switch from the Bluetooth headset to the iPhone.