Gadgetory

hello Diane Gary Sims from Android or authority now I've done lots of videos about Bluetooth 5 in the little last while because there's been so much confusion about the capabilities or Bluetooth 5 and one of the problems I had is I couldn't get the Galaxy s8 to work with Bluetooth 5 but thanks to the people from Nordic semiconductors I now managed to get the Nordic semiconductors Bluetooth 5 development board working with a galaxy f8 so if you want to know how I did it and what I found out please let me explain now if you remember the situation was this there is no support in Android at the moment for Bluetooth 5 so therefore it's not possible to write an Android application using an Android SDK to start making a Bluetooth 5 connection to another device now there's no SDK from Samsung either so really at that point and I made my last thing about this I thought that's it there's no Bluetooth 5 support at all well there is but there's a trick normally you would take your Android device and it would act as the central device and it would connect to a peripheral normally like you know like a Fitbit or something like that this would be the main and this would be the peripheral now actually you can't do that with the galaxy s 8 because there is no API but what the people from Nordic semiconductors points out to me is if you start with the development board as the master and connect to the s8 as a peripheral then actually the s8 recognizes the incoming Bluetooth 5 connection and will establish that connections and the two will start to speak in fact there is actually also another trick you can actually start with the Galaxy f8 write your app and you can connect using Bluetooth 4 and then the other device can say back to this one hey do you support Bluetooth 5 can we upgrade this link to a Bluetooth 5 connection so again you can't do it from the galaxy s 8 but the other device can kind of suggests that we upgrade the connection to negotiate is the proper word to a Bluetooth 5 connection then you get a Bluetooth 5 connection working so what I've done is I've taken the SA taken the development board and I've done some testing indoors only to see about the speed and the range of Bluetooth 5 now I've done three tests the first test the two devices are literally next to each other just a few centimeters apart then I move the device out into the hallway away from my main office it's about 5 meters it has to go through one wall and then after that I move it across the hallway into another room which is about 11 meters away and has to go through two rooms and in each place I've tested the speed so let's take a look at those speed numbers okay so first of all when they are next to each other I managed to get one megabit a second now that's slightly less than I was getting when I was using to development boards side-by-side however that is obviously a significant throughput one megabit a second many said over Bluetooth I was use Bluetooth low-energy not Bluetooth classic like we use for the speakers and for audio streaming of the headset this is Bluetooth Low Energy the kind of stuff you use when you're talking to a Fitbit or a SmartWatch so one megabit a second when they were next to each other now that would be good enough for audio streaming all your over Bluetooth Low Energy when we finally get that standard into the Bluetooth specification now my second test which was five meters away and through one wall I managed to get 915 kilobits per second so that's naught point nine megabits a second so not much of a drop there in the speed and again that would be absolutely fine for audio streaming over Bluetooth Low Energy when that comes out then my final test was two rooms away across the hallway into another room two walls 11 meters away and once I started to get further away now the speed here dropped to 460 kilobits a second now that drop is quite significant for 160 kilobits a second is kind of really on the edge of what we could use for audio streaming so what we're finding here is it because of the advantages of Bluetooth 5 the extra speed we're actually able to do a high lap throughput for audio even when you're through to wall and when you're about 1011 meters away I then tried a fourth test actually further away than that and I couldn't get the connection to work so this seems to be kind of a limit now in my house because I've got different types of walls and you've got in your house I've got wooden walls rock wall walls if you've got concrete walls or brick walls we've got ironworking of always all going to change how the distances work but for me when we get Bluetooth Low Energy audio streaming over Bluetooth Low Energy this is going to work at least to a distance of 10 11 12 13 meters now remember don't get confused is four times range thing that people have been talking about for Bluetooth 5 only applies to a very special mode that's inside bluetooth I which is very low bandwidth only 100 and 920 something like that kilobits per second now the most I got here was a thousand kilobits a second so it's 10 times less on this long distance speed long distant long-distance setting so that isn't getting any good for for streaming audio but in terms of what we do today with our headsets and with our speakers Bluetooth Low Energy using audio over Bluetooth Low Energy could become a reality and it will work I'm going from Android and I hope you've enjoyed all these Bluetooth 5 videos that I've done so I'm really happy actually managed to get Bluetooth 5 working over the Samsung s8 to the Nordic semiconductors test board it does work and I am getting a megabit a second when using them in very close range which other well I hope you enjoyed this video if you did please do give it a thumbs up also don't forget to subscribe to Android authorities YouTube channel please hit that notification builder you'll get notification whenever we'll release a new video and last but not least do go with - 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