A couple of updates on my communications with Pebble about the audio interference, especially the A2DP but also the handsfree interference (which makes handsfree calls in my car near impossible most of the time).
I also get a response to a tweet about Pebble not really being ready for mass consumer use:
I am happy that they are shooting to be the best, but I still don’t think they are quite there yet (and to be honest the recent versions have been going backwards IMHO).
Battery Issue
The latest on the battery issues I am seeing with the latest firmware came in the form of this email from their support team:
The logs I referenced were from 1 charge cycle, which did not reveal the substantial drop in battery life that you experienced in the aforementioned charge cycles.
Since we’ve verified the issue, let’s get you Pebbled again as soon as possible!
To make sure I fill out your Replacement Authorization with the correct information, could you please confirm the following:
…
Please also include a picture of the back of your Pebble with the Serial Number clearly shown and “Case # 239312 ” written beneath it on a slip of paper.
Once you have confirmed the above, I will fill out your Replacement Authorization and get you set up with a new Pebble!
So, aside from the fact that seeing one charge cycle that looked OK was enough for them to dismiss the issue initially (even though the report clearly stated that the battery issue was somewhat random), now their answer is to swap the hardware without any explanation. Since the watch is clearly operating normally, and some of the time has a very acceptable 10% per day battery consumption rate, I don’t see this being hardware. Seems far more likely that the problem is a software issue with something getting stuck in a state where the radio is on more than it should be.
Audio Issues
On the audio issues, I am not getting far either. The best response I got was to the update I sent their support organization with two 30 second samples recorded from an external Bluetooth speaker with and without the Pebble connected to the phone too:
With Pebble Connected:
Without Pebble Connected:
The drop outs you hear in those happen on all the A2DP playback devices I have tried so far, and only with the latest firmware (previously music playback to Bluetooth devices was fine). That got this reply from support which I take as progress:
Thank you for your e-mail and demonstration. The engineers have been made aware of this issue and are working on a fix for future updates.
I should probably try to record some samples of a phone call too so that they can hear how bad that is (it is much worse than the A2DP).