I recently purchased two items that I’ve been disappointed with. They not amateur radio products, fortunately, but they are radio-related, so I thought I’d blog about them.
The first product to disappoint are the Amazon Echo Buds, 2nd Generation. I purchased these when they went on sale for $80. That sounded like a great deal, especially considering they offered automatic noise cancellation. I planned to use them when watching videos or listening to podcasts on my Amazon Fire tablet while I’m on my rowing machine or lifting weights. The rowing machine is quite noisy, so I thought that the noise cancellation feature would come in handy.
Unfortunately, as amazing as it sounds, the Amazon Echo Buds WILL NOT WORK with my Amazon tablet! I spent more than an hour goofing around with this before I gave up. The tablet pairs up quite nicely with all of the other Bluetooth speakers that I have, but for some dumb reason, I can’t pair the ear buds with it.
I tweeted about this:
I’m very disappointed that my @amazon Echo Buds aren’t supported by my two-year-old @amazon Fire tablet. I just find that incredible.
and I actually got an email from an Amazon customer service rep. I explained the problem and got the following reply:
I’m sorry to hear about the issue/s experienced with your Echo Buds and Fire Tablet 8 (7th Gen), which prompted you to leave a review.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/profile?ref_=ya_d_l_profile
From the developers : Fire 7 (all generations), Fire HD 8 (9th gen or older), and Fire HD 10 are not compatible with Echo Buds.
The Echo Buds are going to be returned.
Clock needs a software upgrade
I had an Emerson “atomic” clock for years that bit the dust last summer during a power outage. I’m guessing that the power surge when the power came back on somehow caused the clock’s power supply to fail. It’s been on my pile of things to be repaired since then, but I wasn’t able to find a schematic for it online, and that made fixing it more difficult. Last week, I decided to just buy another one.
So, I searched through Amazon and found the Ambient Weather RC-8465 Projection Alarm Clock. It not only syncs to WWVB, but also projects the time on a wall or the ceiling. It also has a built-in temperature sensor to let you know how hot or cold it is in the room. And, it cost only $20.
I like the clock, but one of it’s quirks is that while it does show the indoors temperature on the projected image, every once in a while it would display “–.- F OUT.” Guessing that that was the outdoor temperature, I looked for a way to turn that off, since I don’t have the outdoor sensor. I didn’t find out how to do so in the instructions, so I sent an email to the address in the instruction sheet. They replied:
Thank you for contacting support. unfortunately, this model is designed to show outdoor and indoor temperature there is no way to turn off this base function.
OK, I thought, maybe I’ll get the outdoor temperature sensor. Well, as it turns out, the outdoor sensor costs $30! I emailed them back saying that I guess I’ll just have to live with the funky temperature display. I emailed them back, noting that they should really update the clock’s firmware
Does seem weird that Amazon’s ear buds wouldn’t work with their own product, but perhaps they aren’t Bluetooth, or maybe they are Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) and many older products don’t support BLE? I couldn’t tell for sure from your post, but it sounds like you have an older Fire tablet, so it may be missing BLE support.
It’s interesting that Amazon is so concerned about bad reviews that they have folks monitoring the social nets (Twitter in this case) to contain any bad press. Big brother watching?
I had a WWVB clock I bought in the Dayton flea market from a palette few for $10 a few years ago. What I discovered was that it didn’t bother to check the CRC/checksum on the received signal, so if it missed a bit here or there, it would display completely wacky date/time. After putting up with it for a while, it went in the trash.
Aside from my Citizen Eco-drive watch, the only other WWVB clock I have is the one from MFJ, which is a dual-display clock and runs for months off of two AA batteries. I have display set to local time, and the other to UTC. It doesn’t pick up too well in the basement ham shack, but it receives OK on the main floor of the house. So, if I want a station clock during a contest, I just bring it upstairs a day or so before, and let it re-sync.
I’m less dependent on that clock these days, since I now have a digital Geochron display on the wall above the station which shows local and UTC time, synced to the Internet.
I also have a QRP-labs GPS clock, but I’ve not finished building that into a case with the GPS antenna remote. I need to design a battery-backup for it, so a momentary power outage won’t affect it. I’m thinking of getting one of those 3.7V LiIon packs with a buck-boost converter/charger to give my the 5V I need to run the clock and GPS receiver/antenna.
The tablet is only two years old, so it should work. I was actually thinking of buying an HD10 to get the bigger display, but the rep’s message says, the Buds won’t work with that model, either.