Last year when Apple announced the AirPods headphones, they also announced a new W1 chipset that would help make Bluetooth pairing between the devices seamless and done in a cinch. This is versus current pairing methods which can be a bit slow and sometimes unreliable, which could explain why the AirPods have been doing so well.For Android users who are hoping to see something similar, you’re in luck as Google has since announced “Fast Pair” for Android. According to Google, “Fast Pair makes discovery & pairing of Bluetooth devices easy and is currently rolling out to Android 6.0+ devices. Ease of use, speed and security are the design principles driving the Fast Pair specification. Fast Pair uses BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy) for advertising and discovery and uses classic Bluetooth for pairing.”
Unlike Apple’s solution which will require dedicated hardware, Fast Pair seems to be more of a software feature, which as Google points out will be applicable to pretty much all Android devices running Android 6.0 or up. This does give Google the advantage over Apple’s W1 solution, but whether or not it’ll be just as fast/reliable (or more so) remains to be seen, but it’s still great news all the same.