SanDisk Bluetooth mistake (Clip Sport Plus)

SANDISK's BLUETOOTH BANANA SKIN!

I'm publishing this because, the last I knew, SanDisk had done a very strange thing indeed. If you go looking for the full technical description of the SanDisk Clip Sport Plus, you'll find one technical detail manifestly missing (at least at the time of me writing this). Try as you might, you won't turn up what version Bluetooth is being used, as a transmitter, on this MP3 player.

I suppose if I'd dropped the ball in quite the way that SanDisk has, I might try to keep it quiet. It's true that the company can legitimately claim to have included Bluetooth functionality in this MP3 player, but its version 2. So, anything you are thinking of pairing it with had better be extremely backward compatible (or so old that it's not much short of a miracle that it still working)!

It's puzzling that such an old and useless version of Bluetooth should have been baked into one of their more recent devices and I suspect you wouldn't get any sense out of them, if you ever tried to ask them why on earth they decided to use such an ancient version of  Bluetooth.

My sole reason for publishing this posting was to make potential customers aware of what they could be buying  and the likelihood of them having the hassle of returning the product, once they discover that the damn thing won't work with much that is current technology.  It's not the first time that SanDisk have screwed things up quite so badly. I was one of the unfortunate individuals who bought the earlier model of Clip Sport, when it first came out. I discovered, somewhat latterly, that this had a reputation for locking up for no apparently good reason. Fully aware of this design flaw, SanDisk (nonetheless) carried on selling the product.

The Alexa gift and ongoing puzzles

It's a funny old world and here I am trying to re-purpose my old blog! I've just spent absolutely ages deleting all the old entries, so that I can (more or less) start afresh.

Apart from the usual church-free christmas, which is the normal and usual way of things for me, I got one rather unusual and unexpected gift. A good friend bought me an Alexa Echoed Plus and I've spent about a week messing around with it. I've discovered that my main use for it turns out to be as a wireless loudspeaker! It's ironic, because (as I understand it) this electronic device is mainly used as a means of driving other devices (and not the other way around). As far as I can make out, configuring in and using a Bluetooth transmitter as a means of playing the output of your MP3 player, through the Alexa speaker, is an undocumented function.

I got too clever for my own good, a couple of days ago and tried using the very same transmitter in conjunction with another kind of receiver. I then discovered that the Alexa unit could no longer locate the transmitter. It took me awhile to realise that there was quite possibly a command that got Alexa to go looking for existing Bluetooth devices, and this worked!

I know I can play stuff from my Audible library on this unit, but there isn't a viable way of doing the same thing with audiobooks in MP3 format, not that I've been able to find (so far), although I've only been hunting around for a few days! I'm not surprised that Amazon want to try and shut out other sound formats as much as possible, so was to retain their jealously guarded exclusivity. There are normally weighs around Amazon's attempts at generating a monopoly, but they are not all that easy to find (in my experience).