IOGEAR GBU521 Bluetooth 4.0 Micro Adapter

Pros: I posted an earlier review that said the IOGear didn't work with Fedora, I was wrong it does. It's not plug and play and the GUI tools can't find it until you've configured it with the bluetoothctl command line utility, but once you've done that it works with bluedevil-wizard GUI tool.

I paired it with two audio devices, a set of Bose Bluetooth headphones and a Grace Digital Bluetooth amplifier. It works reliably with both.

Cons: None

Overall Review: Setting up the device, use the bluetoothctl command line utitilty,

bluetoothctl

Find the device #
list

After you've found it then select it

select #

Then make it pairable

pairable on

You can then scan for devices

scan on

You can then pair a device that it finds,

pair #

Alternatively now that you've made pairable you can now use the bluedevil-wizard to pair devices.

After you've paired and connected to the device you can go to the Sound Preferences control panel and select it. I have a set of Bose Bluetooth headphones and a Grace Digital bluetooth amplifier, I was able to play music though both of them using High Fidelity Playback (A2DP Sink) however the Headset Unit mode that's available for the Bose headphones doesn't work, this is probably the fault of Fedora 21.

Pros: -Is a working blue tooth adapter
-cheap, small
-not much else

Cons: -Does not support aptX
-slow speeds
-drivers were not easy to setup

Overall Review: So, long story short, I ordered a bluetooth pair of earbuds and this bluetooth adapter to go with my phone (galaxy S4) to try out all this new-fangled wireless stuff (wireless charging is pretty sick).

I got my earbuds today, they are a mid-range set. I have a pair of cheap wired earbuds (3.5mm) which to me sound fine. I was *floored* at how bad the sound on these were when paired with my computer to the point I was going to send the earbuds back. I was ready to write off bluetooth as worthless entirely.

I decided to read through the manual and saw a little blurb about aptX and decided to try them with my phone (which has aptX) just for curiosity's sake. It sounds fine. Good even. Point is, if you are planning to play any sort of audio over bluetooth... this adapater is not for you.

Additionally, my transfer speeds between this and my phone are like, 70kb/s with the phone right next to the adapter. That is far too slow, so I got an app to run an ftp sever (phone and computer on the same home network) which goes much, much faster.

Should also note, the driver setup was pretty terrible. Including one 'supported' function that just... doesn't have a windows 7 driver (I manually installed the 'generic unsupported bluetooth function' driver).

So, all in all, this adapter failed to deliver usable quality/speed for the two things I bought it for, although they technically worked.