[louzer]

I'm a huge fan of the Bridge. Since my phone is always by my side and I usually have my Playbook with me and since I've had very good luck with battery life with both my Playbook and my 9650, I leave bluetooth enabled on both devices all the time.

I work mostly on my Playbook except when I receive an SMS (soon to not be the case with what I'm hearing about 2.1 features) so I'm constantly using the Bridge PIM apps. When I'm not in a wifi area, it actually takes me a moment or two to notice because the bridge connection takes over right away. But this is not news to anyone here.

I've recently discovered how efficiently BB products use the many types of radios on devices and make them all play well.

Here's where it's started getting really fun:

I bought a pair of Rocketfish (Best Buy brand) bluetooth headphones. The have fairly good audio quality and they allow me to pair with my Playbook and walk around listening to music or podcasts without having to worry about pulling the Playbook off my desk by accident.

The headphones have a play/pause button on the side and a volume rocker on the bottom. I also discovered that they also have a microphone. So I decided to try a little experiment.

Since I don't like to leave my phone and/or Playbook's bluetooth as always discoverable, when I turn on the headphones, I need to select them from the paired devices list in the bluetooth settings on my Playbook. I decided to try the headphones on my phone so I paired the headphones to the phone. When the connection established, I saw a message on the phone that the headphones paired with 'Handsfree', 'Stereo Audio', and 'Audio Control'. This meant that I can listent to music, use the play/pause and volume controls to control the music player, and also use the headphones for hands-free phone usage.

So then, I turned the headphones off and then back on. I went to the bluetooth settings on my Playbook, tapped the icon for the headphones, and tapped the 'connect' button. It connected. Then I looked at my phone which also detected the headphones and was asking me if I want to pair. I selected yes and my phone told me that it was paired for 'handsfree' mode (but not stereo audio or audio control).

I opened the music player app and hit the play button on the side of the headphones. The music started playing. While the music was playing, I called my BB from my landline. The music on the Playbook immediately paused and I hit the answer button on the headphones. I was now hearing the phone call. When I hung up, it went back to playing the music on the Playbook.

That, in itself, is pretty cool to me, but it gets better. While I'm listening to music, I hear a notification that I got an email. Without thinking, I open the Bridge mail app and am reading my email. As I'm reading, I'm realizing that the bridge is managing a bluetooth connection between the phone and the Playbook while a connection is also being managed between my headphones and my Playbook for music. And then, while those were still active, I received a call on my BB phone. Even more incredible.

So then, I turned wifi off on my Playbook and while reading email over the bridge and listening to music, I opened my browser. My Playbook was browsing over bluetooth calling my phone's wifi connection to get out to the internet. Then, while a page was loading, I turned off wifi on the phone. The phone seemlessly switched over to the 3G radio and finished loading the page without missing a beat.

I'm sure that other brand devices have pretty sophisticated means to manage data over multiple connections and also can seemlessly switch from 3/4G to wifi. But there's something about this use case involving the bridge connection that makes it particularly cool to me.

Given all of the doom and gloom recently, I just wanted to share.

[00stryder]

Awesome story! I remember my own "IDKYCDT moment" (side bar: I miss Joseph Holder's posts ) when I discovered with the first developer's build way back when that the PlayBook seamlessly changed between wifi and bridge when managing network traffic. This was before RIM consolidated the native browser and the bridge browser together and it wasn't publicly advertised that the bridge connection could handle non-bridge apps.

I haven't done anything as elaborate as you did, but I think the same system is used to manage bridged connections while using the mini keyboard peripheral that everybody's dying to get. The real question is, how many simultaneous connections can the system handle? This may very well be a glimpse of the "BlackBerry Solution" where BB10 (QNX) handles a multitude of connections for the users seamlessly and easily.