Thursday, May 30, 2013

Personal Hotspot Is Better Over Bluetooth

Matthew Guay:

Bluetooth tethering. It sounds archaic and slow, but actually worked out better. And it wasn’t slow, either: the speeds were essentially the same as I typically get through 3G already, or around 1.5Mb down and 1Mb up. Comically, it was faster to connect. I always seem to have a somewhat tricky time getting my iPhone’s Wifi hotspot to show up in areas with tons of Wifi networks, but connecting via Bluetooth literally took two seconds.

He also says that it uses less battery power than Wi-Fi.

Update (2015-05-27): I just tried Personal Hotspot over Bluetooth and found that it was much slower than over Wi-Fi.

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One disadvantage of Bluetooth tethering is that push notifications (at least on iOS devices) don't seem to reach the device through it (including both sending and receiving iMessage). No idea if this is a bug or a feature, but otherwise, Bluetooth tethering does is indeed pretty neat (you can even have multiple devices connected to a single iPhone at once!).

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