Phones with good BLE implementation

[ned_zeppelin]

After testing with 5-6 different phones it is evident that there are major differences in how well BLE is actually supported. The Android/Iphone (and manufacturer SW) version also has a major impact on the BLE performance in some cases.

So my first question is: Does anyone have recommendations/experiences with phones that have a good BLE implementation?

What I'm looking for is a "golden device" for development and testing, i.e. a phone that is able to handle multiple connections to BLE peripherals (as many as possible), is able to maintain a stable connection (to one or many peripherals), etc. Note that it must be Android or iOS.

My second question is: Does anyone have any experiences or estimations of how many simultaneous connections a phone can have with S110 peripherals?

The worst case data rate per unit for my purposes will be around 60 bytes per second (480 bps). The average rate will typically be around 25 bytes per second (200 bps) per unit.

[Hung Bui]

@ned: Which phone did you have bad experience ?

From my observation, BLE stack on iOS devices seems to be more stable and well implemented.

Samsung's and Nexus' device (not the earlier Nexus such as Nexus 7, Nexus 4) are pretty stable also.

You can get on most phone/tablet minimum connection interval of 20ms and about 4 packets per connection interval, which brings you 4kB/s.

You may experience lower data throughput when you have more peripheral connect to the same central at the same time. Usually I can see a phone can connect to 3-4 peripherals before it having trouble doing scaning to connect to another one.

[cocoa]

iPhone starting from 4S, use CoreBluetooth framework to manage ble.

-c

[ned_zeppelin]

Huawei Y530 and HTC Desire 610 performs somewhat weaker that the others we have tried. My impression is also that Samsung (S4 in this case) seems like a good performer. Nexus might also be a good choice. Iphone has not been tried yet, but it sounds like that would be a safe bet.

[ned_zeppelin]

As for the number of peripherals our goal is 6-8. Do you think that would be unrealistic (for a "golden device")?

[Hung Bui]

@ned_zeppelin: I actually haven't tried to know what the maximum peripheral one phone can handle. I guess it depends largely on the chipset, driver, the connection interval of each connection. I tried with 7.5ms conection interval and got up to 4-5 peripheral at little while ago. Our S120 central Stack supports 8 connections with peripheral at a time.