The official tablet (and other useless electronics) thread!

[WRXtranceformed]

can someone please tell me why iPhones suck so bad at connecting to external hardware when it's not something that Apple built?  Before I get a bunch of replies of "well my iBoner has always connected to everything you crazy", objectively over the last year I have probably been asked to help at least 5 different people with iPhones connect to some kind of speaker or smart-something and every single one of them has been a colossal pain to set up or just flat out didn't work.  Within a matter of a minute or two I can get my S8 paired to them.  I'm also excluding from this the multiples of people who have told me that they have issues pairing and using their brand new iPhones with their brand new car interfaces.

What are you trying to connect to that's so difficult? Can't say I've had issues. The only goofy one was making my iPhone play music (over USB) to my Range Rover. The car didn't recognize it (as an iPod, old infotainment) because I didn't have any music stored in the Apple music app. Once I had any single song in Music.app, it would let it stay connected so I could just use Spotify or whatever, and have steering wheel controls work for whichever app was playing. That's a LR problem given the old protocol it uses, though.

Hell, with the right adapters/creativity you can hook up a whole bunch of USB devices and they are supported, too.

Most recently, a Sonos speaker that you have to connect via WiFi and an app (stupid, what speakers don't have Bluetooth nowadays) at my uncle's house.  We never did get that to work, although my brother's iPhone finally paired with it.  And a Vizio Bluetooth sound bar that took my neighbor and I about 15 minutes worth of failed attempts before it connected.  Toward the end while we were trying to set it up, I was able to pair my S8 in about 30 seconds and played music on it until it finally worked on his iPhone.

The last car related issue was my in my buddy's brand new TLX.  I can't remember exactly what the issue was again but I think it was the phone wouldn't always remember the car and commands from the phone wouldn't work (ie. voice text) when it was paired.