There are also headphones with built in players, I don't know how the quality of those is though.
Because you might want to stream audio from the Internet, or you don't want to waste time converting newer audio formats to MP3 and then copying them over, or you'd rather not have cables around you when you work out, or you might want to track what you've listen (particularly useful for audiobooks and long podcasts), etc.
Yes, these are not indispensable life necessities nor anything like that, but given the choice, I'd rather beam the audio from my tablet than carry an extra player.
Sony still does players but they're not very good.
Mind you, i have also been able to connect to a USB dongle through solid wood walls, so mileage may vary.
Never mind that you can get two classes of radios, on top of the LE stuff. With each class having different transmission strengths.
More range may help thing. Well I can hope anyway.
The only times I've trouble with BT outside is when tons of people or shops are nearby (overcrowded 2.4 ghz spectrum I assume - bt, wifi, etc)
Not sure. I remember reading an article some time ago that stated the Sun's electromagnetic radiation could interfere with Bluetooth and it's always worked with my observations. I've used multiple Plantronics headsets, Motorola headphones and an off brand of headphones all with an iPhone 5S, iPhone 6+, Nexus 6P, Moto X and a Note 3 and in all of these devices they work great indoors and going outside on a sunny day it would break up (but cloudy always seemed to work better).
It's entirely possible this is some crazy bullshit but my observations are real. So if it ends up being that the Sun does NOT provide interfere then it must be SOMETHING. I just had this issue this past week when I was working outside and had to grab my wired headphones.
And likely your best results will be if both devices are v5 devices.
Well, I've used wireless keyboards (Apple compact) and wireless headphones (Parrot Zik 2.0), and had zero disconnects under the hottest of Suns in several different countries.
What do you mean "line of sight"? How far were you? Was it behind some wall or something? With the iPad/phone on my pocket/bag I never had any issue.
Basically if the BT hardware itself was on the right side of my head then my phone had to be in my right pocket or I'd get semi frequent disconnects outside. So not really line-of-sight in visual spectrum terms but I have had so many observations with so many bluetooth headsets and headphones and different phones that I always believed the original article I read a long time ago about sun interference (which, of course, I can't find today).
It could certainly be something else but I most certainly have reproducible issues with using bluetooth outside versus inside my house or even car.
Sounds like it's more about some flimsy and/or underpowered BT headsets.
That said - that seems rather impressive for Bluetooth, I've had one reinforced concrete wall pretty consistently screw up most bluetooth signals in my experience, so I'd posit that you're getting unusually good reception there.
[1]https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=209473
I've heard a couple of complaints about Macs but they're rare.
Seems the Android BT stack is just more... flaky. I wonder why...
Come 4.4 Google partnered up with qualcomm (again iirc) to write a new stack from scratch.
Then again, if I'm biking and my phone is in my right pocket and I turn my head to the left, the audio skips. So I don't know if I can blame than on range, but there's something odd going on there.
Zigbee and other 802.15.4 protocols will always be at a disadvantage even for tasks the Bluetooth protocol is not suited for. Bluetooth chips are cheap and more widely supported than anything else because Bluetooth radios are manufactured at massive scale for the phone market.
And BTLE is specifically designed to work without the pairing dance.
Actually, for industrial applications, it's more likely to be Zigbee that is already there, and the economies of scale will favour it over BTLE (particularly when you consider Zigbee allows thousands of devices in a network, while BTLE can't even get to double digits). There's a ton of other advantages to Zigbee for industrial applications (not the least of which is resiliency).
Maybe you want a bluetooth bridge (though WiFi is probably very tempting for that purpose), but bluetooth is bad enough at doing its own job, let alone something else.