Gadgetory

hello I'm garrison from and or authority now recently I did my truth about Bluetooth 5 video which I did using to development boards from Nordic semiconductor and using those development boards I have to test the throughput and the range of Bluetooth 5 now after I done that I turn my attention to the Galaxy s8 because the Galaxy s8 has a Bluetooth 5 chip inside of it so I thought to myself I'll write an app and I'll test the capabilities of Bluetooth 5 on the Galaxy s8 unfortunately I haven't been able to do that so the question is why can't you use Bluetooth 5 on the Galaxy s8 today and when will you be able to use it well let me explain okay first of all a bit of a recap there's lots of misinformation about Bluetooth 5 kind of going around is in some very popular videos made by very popular YouTube personalities who don't actually know what they're talking about and the main problem is this is that this kind of 2 x speed and 4 x distance that is kind of being advertised about bluetooth 5 isn't exactly what people think it is now in the testing i did in my the truth about bluetooth 5 video we see that Bluetooth 5 does give you twice the speed when the devices are close to each other and that's very good and that's excellent however when you move the two Bluetooth devices further apart the further apart you get abruptly that speed tasks to drop off and in fact when you get to the edge of the kind of range between the two devices you'll find that Bluetooth 5 and Bluetooth 4 le have the same kind of throughput now the thing about 4 times the distance is actually a special mode that's inside Bluetooth 5 we decoded connection that send multiple bits to make sure that if there's an error along the way that data is still received but it had a very very low bitrate maybe only 109 kilobits per second so the idea that you'll be able to kind of take a Bluetooth 5 speaker and kick it to your Bluetooth 5 smartphone and then kind of just go out into the garden out into your yard and downstair and then there's this huge distance between them and you'll still get your music come out is basically not true at all you basically get the long distance if you're using a special connecting mode but as a very low bitrate if you're using it just for normal audio or other types of connections it's going to be the same as bluetooth 4 but it's going to be faster when they're closer together so I wanted to write an app to the galaxy s 8 to test the throughput capabilities and the range capabilities of the galaxy s 8 so the first thing I did was I went over to Samsung's developer website and I started to look amongst their documentation there about how you access the Bluetooth 5 features on the Galaxy s8 and there was no documentation at this point I kind of did a double-take maybe I'm mistaken here maybe there isn't Bluetooth 5 in the Galaxy s8 so I went over to the Bluetooth website and I found the certification for the Galaxy S a and it does say in there that there is Bluetooth 5 but there are some conditions first of all it does support the new 2 megabits per second physical connection so that's really good works really what we're looking for but it doesn't support the coda connection so there's never going to be there's four times the range support inside of the galaxy s 8 but you will get that faster throughput so now we know the hardware supported I went back again to investigate the software now at this point I started sending emails out and my colleagues and Android 40 sites any emails out to various different people first of all I emailed the Bluetooth people themselves we also got in contact with Google and moved to try to get in contact with Samsung now the Bluetooth people email me back the next day very very politely they were not able to give me any more information other than what's publicly given almost dissertation site however they were very helpful but they were bound by different agreements they can't talk about what Samsung have or don't have in their phone but thank you to the Bluetooth people for replying and talking to us also while Chris Karl on my colleague was at Google i/o he found some pretty smart Google engineers and he talks them about Android support for Bluetooth 5 and the situation is the current version of Android Android n does not have blue to five supporting it however Android Oh will have Bluetooth five support in it in fact it's already in the developer previews and it's already in the Android Open Source project you if you go and look at the code that good would have published for handling Bluetooth five connections but of course you can't just take Android Oh even the Developer Preview and put it on an a phone that only got Bluetooth 4 in it like the pixel or or a Nexus device and get Bluetooth 5 to have Bluetooth 5 you have to have the new hardware so there's no way to actually test the Google implementation of Bluetooth 5 on Android on the current cropper phone you would be able to do it on the s8 but there is no developer preview for the s8 for Android oh we tried several of us tried contacting Samsung I emailed the people on their developer portal other representatives tried going through their PR people and basically the only reply we've got back from Samsung is thanks for your question we're looking into we get back to now some of these questions we sent over 2 weeks ago and Samsung have not said anything to us now the reality is if there was a solution for using Bluetooth 5 on Android on the Galaxy S a they would reply very quickly with his a link to the documentation please use this SDK please do this and it will all work there has been nothing and that is because there is nothing basically there is no support for Bluetooth 5 on the current version Android running on the galaxy s 8 now it doesn't mean that Samsung won't publish something maybe even and I'm publishing this video they could publish an SDK they should publish some documentation but now there is nothing you can use my feeling is what's going to actually happen if they're going to wait until Android officially supports Bluetooth 5 when Android o comes out now what that means is that if they follow the PlayBook of last year for winning Android n was released we're going to see the new release of Android sometime this summer maybe August and then it's going to be a few months while Samsung take Android N and start shipping on their phone so in 2018 May be in January in February we might start to see Android Oh appearing on the galaxy sa with Bluetooth 5 capabilities built into it so until then Bluetooth 5 hardware is in the Galaxy s8 but there's no software to use it so it remains effectively dead locked inaccessible until Android brings us support when and then that new version Android is installed on the galaxy s 8 so I'd love to hear from you in the comments what you think about the situation should Samsung have produced some kind of interim SDK to the Bluetooth side to be used on the fa should they have been more upfront about say the support will come in 2018 should they have maybe just not even mention the fact that has Bluetooth 5 and then surprised this next year when we found it has Bluetooth 5 support please tell me in the comments below what you think Samsung should have done and go sim from Android 14 I hope you enjoyed this video if you did please do give it a thumbs up also those forget to subscribe to and authorities YouTube channel hit that Bell symbol so you get notifications whenever we publish new videos and lots of great videos coming for you over the next few weeks and last but not least please do go over to Andrew authority calm because we are your source sporting Android