Which smartphone works well with 101's Bluetooth?

Official Hardware Retired 101
1

I am trying to run the Genuino 101 BLE examples (CurieBLE -> LED), but I am experiencing troubles with my phone dropping the BT connection very quickly. It is a Samsung Galaxy J5 (Android 5.1.1) and it sees the 101, can connect to it, but disconnects after a few seconds. A Samsung Galaxy S3 (Android 4.3) sees the 101 but won't connect to it. A Samsung Galaxy Tab 3 (Android 4.4.2, not a phone) shows the same behavior as the J5. All this is Samsung stuff. A Nokia Lumia 530 (Windows) connects perfectly fine and keeps the connection forever. Unfortunately the Evothings Viewer app needed for the demo is not available for Windows phones.

So my question is: which Android smartphone/tablet works properly with the 101's BLE examples?

BTW, how do iPhones/iPads perform in this area?

Thanks for your help!

2

pfodApp (www.pfod.com.au) connects from Android phones to 101 via BLE (pfodApp also supports Bluetooth, WiFi and SMS connections to other boards)

I test using two phones Asus Zenphone 5 (ASUS_T00J) running Android 4.4.2
and Nexus P6 running Android 6.0.1

Both of these work fine.
BLE support was introduced in Android V4.2 but that version and V4.3 were very buggy. V4.4 improved the BLE support

Previously I had problems with the connection dropping out after 5mins but Arduino board firmware/libary updates seem to have fixed that.

Advertisement for pfodApp,
a free pfodDesignerV2 app is available that will let you design pfodApp menus on your Android phone and then generate the Arduino code that reproduces them. see http://www.forward.com.au/pfod/pfodDesigner/index.html for detailed examples

3

Well, what do you know! I loaded your Arduino101_led_control.ino demo, compiled it and uploaded it with Arduino 1.6.10 to my 101. Then on my Galaxy J5 used nRF Toolbox to create UART commands {A~0} and {A~1}, connected the phone to the 101 BLE it found and everything works perfectly fine! LED goes on and off on demand. I guess your code is better than Intel's. Or maybe it is Nordic's app that is better at keeping connections? I guess I'll have ot investigate some more.

(interesting, this pfod stuff)

4

Interesting. I tested with MIT App Inventor. I thought is the App buggy. But seeing your thread, I think might be some firmware or software problem with phone or the BLE firmware for 101.

Interested to know more too. Keep me in the loop !