Skip to main content

Fast Pair is Android's answer to Apple's effortless AirPods pairing .

The convenience depends on accessory makers adopting it.

Apple users are quickly growing accustomed to effortless wireless pairing between the iPhone (or Mac computers) and AirPods, but Google has been working on something that should remove at least some frustration from connecting Bluetooth gadgets to Android phones. Some speakers and headphones let you speed up the pairing process with NFC, which is pretty convenient, but now devices running Android 6.0 and above will get yet another, even better option: Fast Pair.

This new approach uses Bluetooth Low Energy and your Android phone’s location to automatically discover Bluetooth accessories in close proximity and then automatically connect with a tap. It even shows a picture of the product you’re using. Sound familiar?

When you’ve got a Fast Pair-enabled device nearby (and there are less than a handful of them to start), your Android smartphone will fetch the device's product image, product name, and companion app — if one exists — from Google’s servers. Once you hit connect, you should see a confirmation when pairing is successful. Then, Android will offer to download the accessory’s companion app. (Noise-cancelling headphones often have apps to configure , as do some speakers.)

The actual pairing process still uses “classic Bluetooth,” so Google isn’t making any claims about improved connection reliability. But Bluetooth 5 should help in that regard as more phones and headphones, speakers, etc. are released with it.

This is definitely the way things should be — especially as more and more Android phones lose the headphone jack. Bravo, Google. And it’s great to see that support extends back to Android Marshmallow. But for Fast Pair to become a widespread Android convenience, accessory makers will need to adopt the feature. It’s not a thing that will just work immediately for all of your existing Bluetooth gadgets. To do that, they can register with Google here.

Supported headphones at launch include Google’s Pixel Buds, Libratone's Q Adapt On-Ear, and Plantronics Voyager 8200-series wireless headsets. The only thing users need to do is have the latest version of Google Play Services (11.7) installed, which is rolling out over the coming days and weeks.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Floyd Mayweather Baby Mama Sues for $20 Mil ... He's a Despicable Liar

Floyd Mayweather could lose tens of millions of dollars from his big payday if his baby mama gets her way ... because she's just filed a lawsuit claiming he ruined her with lies to save his own ass. Josie Harris, who has 3 kids with Floyd, claims he lied through his teeth in an interview with Katie Couric just 2 weeks before the big fight ... when he claimed Josie was in a drug-fueled rage and he had to "restrain" her during their infamous 2010 domestic violence incident. Point of fact ... Floyd was convicted of domestic violence and spent two months in jail. Josie recounts her terror in the lawsuit, explaining how she and Floyd had broken up ... but he flew into a jealous rage that night, broke into her home and viciously attacked her while she was sleeping on her couch ... and her kids saw part of the beating. Harris says she is now labeled a drug addict thanks to Mayweather's lies -- and was embarrassed and humiliated on a global scale.   Her lawyer, Dan Friedl...
Post a Comment
Read more

Dangerous sex Positions For Men

The most common cause of pénile injury is found among the variety of potentially dangerous positions used for séxual intercourse. The most popular is the ‘woman-on-top’. This type of position can result in an impact between the pénis against the female pelvis or perineum that can easily traumatize the pénile cylinders. A pénis becomes érect when the lining of the cylinder within it is engorged with blood.  A pénis fracture can occur when there is trauma to the eréct pénis, resulting in a rupture of the cylinder lining. This very painful injury is often accompanied by an abrupt, distressing cracking noise that is immediately followed by dark bruising of the pénis due to blood escaping the cylinder. In ten to 30% of pénis fractures, the urethra is damaged and blood may be visible at the urinary opening. Given these signs, an injury should be relatively simple to diagnose, right? You would be surprised, even with the unsettling sounds of a fracture occurring, many men...
Post a Comment
Read more

AWS Battles Rivals: Advertising Campaign

Amazon Web Services has defeated IBM in a competition for lucrative federal contracts, threatened Microsoft's core businesses, and reshaped corporate technology. In the last few months, the pioneering cloud-computing unit of the online retail giant has taken a page from the playbook of some of its more traditional competitors: It started advertising. Ads have been splashed across billboards and in airport terminals, television spots and web videos, featuring a whiteboard full of sketches of software architecture and appeals to invent something using Amazon's collection of rented computing services. The advertising campaign, which bears the "Build On" tagline, represents a milestone in AWS' march from technology upstart to one of the major players in business software, technologists and marketers say. For many years, AWS didn't advertise, partly because it didn't have to. The service held a wide lead over the competition, and word-of-mouth was enough to...
Post a Comment
Read more