Costco Kirkland Signature 8.0 (Product Information)

NateS: That Superbowl ad really hooked you eh?
I came from more of the open hobby less-expensive side of computers. Always hated Apple for being an expensive, closed, proprietary shop Sure…fine, lovely products. Not sure if I could ever break the dislike. But with their adoption and functionality of hearing aids…well…we’ll see. Seems that other OS’s have the ability but no one’s doing anything with it.
I dabbled in Android but then fell in love with the last of Blackberry. Still running one today. My problem with Android is…Google…and all it entails.

Yes, I was at a friend’s house for a SuperBall Party, and I fell asleep during the game but woke up luckily to see the greatest tv commercial of all time, ending with

“… when 1984 won’t be like ‘1984’ …”

and being a George Orwell fan I totally got it.
No amber 80 character screen for me!

Gotcha! Before Android I had several Treos, both the Palm versions and also the original one by Handspring, the company created by the original inventors of the Palm Pilot, who eventually rejoined Palm. Maybe it was the 300.

All Palm phones8

List of Palm phones, smartphones and tablets

With several made for iPhone aids being available at Costco at great prices, it could make a decent amount of economic sense to bite the bullet and spend a few hundred extra bucks on an iPhone if direct streaming is important. I have android, but I hear fine on the phone with or without aids so not an issue for me, but if it were, I’d probably pick up an Apple 7. If you need to direct stream Android, Phonak’s aid would require far more bucks than switching to Apple.

I suppose we are looking at a few weeks before we start hearing from KS 8.0 users, but I am looking forward to their reviews.

NateS: Oh I had phones before Android. Maybe I could say modern GSM phones. I started with that brick of a phone from Motorola and then got smaller Startec(?) flips and really liked the Samsung Palm flip from Sprint (got it connected in Canada too as it was only sold by Sprint) as my first “smart” phone. Then back to a Motorola Razr and then finally on to modern GSM phones when I discovered the mobile hotspot capability.
And now guess what…Motorola is owned by our good friends at Google.
Edit: Thanks to somebody backchannel…Google owning Motorola is old news.
Edit for pclewis: ok old news as in no longer

You missed the news. Google sold Motorola back in 2014 to Lenovo, who is the Chinese company that bought the PC business from IBM. They still make the ThinkPad. Google bought Motorola mobility for $12B (that is billions) and then sold it 3 years later for less than $3B. They wanted Motorola’s patents, so I guess that was worth a lot.

To me, the functionality of my hearing aids is more important than the brand of phone I use. So when it was time for a new phone, I switched from Android to iOS. Not because I love Apple, but because they had gone to the trouble of making a technology available that let HA makers connect to it. No Android vendor had done this.

There are plenty of things I don’t like about Apple, but they have the best technology for hearing aid users, so I bought the best solution as a hearing aid wearer. Obviously, you don’t NEED connectivity with a phone, but it sure makes things nicer.

I am curious as to why it is important to so many users here to have their phone calls stream directly into their hearing aids. I think my hearing loss is pretty significant, and even with my hearing aids I have trouble understanding what Karen says when we are only a few feet away from each other; yet, when it comes to phone calls, I have my (Android) phone set to automatically turn on the phone’s speaker for both incoming and outgoing calls and, as a result my hearing and undestanding on phone calls is not much of a problem at all. I hold the cell phone up to my ear and seem to hear pretty well through the speaker with the phone against my left ear’s hearing aid.

Is that unusual?

Another possibly relevant issue is texting. With my adult children, I commmunicate back and forth with them primarily with texting. I can express myself well in texts, and I don’t have to worry about whether the timing is bad; they don’t see the text until it is convenient for them; and both sides of the conversation have time to think about how to respond before typing a reply, so there is less chance of offending each other or wounding someone’s pride or getting into an avoidable argument. (Not to mention the fact that with texting with my kids, I often get photos of my grandkids attached along with the conversation!)

Am I the only one that finds texting better than voice conversations when it comes to dealing with family members, especially adult children?

NateS: I’m not sure it’s only about phone calls. Listening to music, listening to the tv, listening to a remote mic…all reasons to use a phone that can connect directly to the HA’s. It’s a ridiculously powerful portable computer that seemingly everyone carries around. I would certainly rather that it wasn’t just Apple that was doing something about it for our specific purpose but I suspect those might be some reasons.

And how about that audiogram?

Yes, I do listen to Karen through a remote microphone which is attached near her chair and always on, and I turn on the receiver in my KS5s through my remote; I also have another microphone in the kitchen which I can switch to if she starts talking to me from the kitchen.

I did post my audiogram in a recent thread but maybe not this one. Here it is as of August 2017.

Incidentally z10user2, based on your long-term DIY electronics experience and acquired knowledge, how about kludging together some sort of iOS>Android audio adapter or converter?

The same place where you chart each point, as you say, there’s a link called Manual Entry where you can simply type in your numbers.
I agree that the chart is a little finicky.

Well…I ain’t no expert. There are others here with far more DIY electronics experience than me. I’m just a curious tinkerer.
What exactly do you mean here though? What sort of adapter are you imagining?

I am assuming that, at some point in the audio stream, the signal between the iPhone and the hearing aids is converted to a non-proprietary form, e.g. bluetooth, and that at that point it could be converted and re-directed to an Android phone, perhaps through an intermediary device like the microphones sold as accessories to hearing aids. Like my microphone, for example.

Elaborating, isn’t the signal used between the iPhone and iPhone-compatible hearing aids really just a low-power consumption form of bluetooth, albeit proprietary?