I found the discussion in the thread Phonak Roger Rip Off interesting because I have been wondering about the best way of handling Bluetooth in hearing aids for a long time. . I wear two Phonak Marvel Audeo M-RT aids. I do not have any Roger devices, although I have wondered about getting one for certain situations (like hearing the conductor of our choir - I find I can hear perfectly well enough to sing properly, but I often can’t hear at all what the conductor is saying). I do have a TV Connector.
It seems to me that Phonak have fallen a long way short of the requirement in their much hyped Bluetooth implementation. I have not yet worked out whether this is to do with shortcomings in the Bluetooth specification or whether they just failed to understand what was really required. What I need is to be able to make and receive phone calls on all my Bluetooth devices. This includes my mobile phone, my desktop PC running Skype, my laptop PC, my landline phones (I have 4 Siemens Gigaset phones with Bluetooth - I don’t know whether these act as a single Bluetooth device, or as 4 separate ones). I find that when the aids are connected to one device (e.g. my mobile phone), then if a call comes in on that device, I can answer it by pressing the button on the aids, and everything works well. If I want to listen to sound on my desktop PC in this situation, then I have to completely power down the mobile phone, and then connect the PC to the aids. I suppose this applies to all the devices. I have to make sure that the aids are not connected to any Bluetooth device, by turning the connected device off. Often I don’t know which device is connected and there seems to be no easy way to find out, so this is a long winded process. Even having done this, the aids will often not connect to the new device. What I sometimes have to do is to delete all memory of the aids from the Bluetooth devices (e.g. by clicking “forget device”), and then re-pair them. Remember that the point of this is to be able to receive incoming phone calls. Obviously all of the above nonsense will take far too long to complete before the caller rings off. It seems to me that I need a way of pairing the aids with up to about 8 different devices, and whichever one receives a call should be automatically connected to the aids. This of course raises the question “what if the aids are at the time connected to something else?” (e.g. if I am listening to music on a different device). Presumably there needs to be a way for the user to be informed that there is an incoming call on another line, preferably with the name of the caller (via a reverse lookup in the directory) and the user must then have the option to switch to the new call, optionally keeping the old connection on hold, and then switching backwards and forwards between the two calls/connections, and when appropriate terminating either one of them. To make things more complicated, there is of course the possibility of more than two concurrent calls at the same time, but maybe properly handling that situation is going too far. To be able to make outgoing calls, I will need some king of voice dialling. There needs to be a way from the aids of switching into voice dialling mode and starting the voice dialling application on the connected device, so that I can say the name of the person I want to call, and the phone will automatically call them. This does not seem to have been thought about either.
Does all of this make sense? Is what I am describing technically possible via the Bluetooth spec? If not, please explain why not. If it IS possible, then why didn’t Phonak implement this? Being able to receive phone calls on my aids without touching the phone is a fantastically useful feature. It just doesn’t meet my need, due to all the different channels that calls can arrive from. Being able to do this was more or less promised to me before I agreed to buy the Marvels…
Thanks - Rowan