gman99

If you have Android Oreo/8.x, most (all?) google apps (including Maps) allow you quite fine grained control over notification categories (so you can choose to have traffic updates and nothing else, if you wish)

Notification categories is not exclusive to google apps, of course (OS level feature as long as your app targets Oreo), but their apps tend to give you very good control over what it shows you.

So, I'd disagree strongly that this is a google "strategy". It's more a problem that their apps tend to have a lot of features crammed in.

Of course, I don't know how this works on iOS (I'd be surprised if it's not in the settings somewhere? It's in their interest that you don't disable all app notifications)

Well, to be explicit, they set the minimum timeframe. For example, the Nexus Player is still on the latest version of Android and will/should receive 'O'

(Not letting google off the hook here. What they're doing isn't great and they should do better. Just saying your statement isn't entirely correct)

Windows 10 can _definitely_ do that (I do the exact same thing with bluetooth/wired headsets frequently; I'm "fairly" sure I used to do that on Windows 7 too -- I remember being quite amazed when my Ubuntu machine "finally" caught up and was able to do the same thing.)

In fact, I quite often start music playing on the laptop (chrome/Google Play Music) and then power up my bluetooth headset -- it initially uses eSCO when it routes the audio over (mono) and then switches to A2DP a few seconds later

Maybe the issue is something to do with the SW (chrome/firefox?) you use for GVoice? Or maybe there are some edge cases that I'm not triggering (in particular, a USB headset is effectively a new soundcard and not just an audio sink; I can completely believe windows is flaky with them especially with third party drivers)

I'm on windows 10 with a shitty "optimus" enabled laptop. The NVidia drivers routinely crash (typically when viewing a heavy webGL enabled page) and windows 10 just flashes at me and throws up a notification saying my graphics drivers have crashed but it helpfully restarted the drivers for me.

Perhaps you have a different issue? Maybe a hardware failure? Windows 10 should not be BSODing for a graphics driver failure

>Are you saying Bluetooth 4 would actually solve my problem

Make sure your headset and device (phone?) both support HFP1.6 or above (which supports wideband speech/HD voice) which makes the sound quality semi-decent

>all Skype calls automatically revert to HFP (extremely bad quality)

While it's true that audio quality over HFP is a lot worse than A2DP, note that A2DP is designed for cases where latency is not an issue, you want stereo audio, and there is no microphone audio to carry the other way. (i.e., designed to listen to music)

If you want low latency mono-audio to the headset + microphone audio back to the host, there is no choice except to use HFP.

Note that if your headset (and your host device) supports HFP1.6, then it should support wideband speech/HD voice and the difference should not be so drastic.