[T-Mobile Samsung Galaxy Note 3] Perion:
Galaxy Gear 2 issues

I wanted to post some of my observations here regarding the Galaxy Gear 2 and Hyperdrive 3. First, I love this ROM, so I've put in a number of hours trying to get the watch to work with it. Since I use it heavily for work and ticket notifications, it's been a deal-breaker for me. A few posts in this thread have helped me narrow the issue down a bit, so I wanted to try to list out what I've found in hopes that it will help someone with more experience inside the operating system track down where this is coming from.

Currently, I'm using Hyperdrive 2 Final on my Note 3 with the Gear 2 and so far, so good. Here's what I've seen trying to get the Gear 2 working with 3.1:

1. Gear Manager will create the initial bluetooth connection with the watch, then warn you that the watch must be wiped. Unfortunately, everything works normally to this point and Gear Manager will wipe the watch. One of the more stupid things about the Gear 2 is that it will not function at all, even as a watch, until it's synchronized to a device. It is also dependent on the Gear Manager software which must always be the master configuration. If you wipe your phone, uninstall the Gear Manager, or otherwise compromise the data, the first thing that the manager will do when reinstalled is to try to factory reset the watch and force you to reinstall all apps, watch faces, etc.

2. Once the device is wiped, Gear Manager will attempt to synchronize with the watch. It does establish the connection, and the connecting screen shows on both devices..and hangs until one side or the other times out.. Normally, what should happen here is that after the two devices connect, Gear Manager should bring up a license agreement that must be accepted, then the two devices will establish their sync. This is usually as far as you can get under Hyperdrive 3.1, any time the request is initiated, I can see the screen come up on the watch, so I know the initial communication is going through, but it hangs and eventually times out at that point and I never get the license agreement on the Note 3.

3. I've tried a number of things to attempt to bypass this problem under 3.1. I've gone back to a different ROM (darthstalker), set up the watch, used Titanium Backup to save any Gear Manager data and apps that I could find, then reinstalled Hyperdrive and attempted to restore the apps and data without wiping the watch, but with very little success. The best luck I had there was from an earlier post in this thread (sorry, can't remember who, but Thank You!), that mentioned installing Hyperdrive 2, setting up the watch, then doing a dirty install of 3. This worked, however, communications with the watch became unstable once I moved to 3.1. However, I think it may have shown me what is causing the issue.

The issue once the watch and manager were set up and running under 3.1 is that the watch would constantly disconnect, so would not receive notification updates, software installs would hang, etc. This feels like a problem with communication over the Bluetooth link. I believe what is happening is that the BT link is established, but return data from the watch is not reaching the Manager, this causes the BT connection to eventually time out. This may be on the API level, since I did find some situations where the Manager said that the Gear 2 was disconnected, but I could still use S-Voice (there's some complexity here, since the Gear 2 seems to mix data and headset communications over the BT link, so one connection could be up while the other down).

I'm afraid that's about as far as I can go, I don't know much of anything about the internal files or services in the Android OS, and there are no direct settings that I've found that should be able to affect Bluetooth at this level. I'm hoping that if I can post a little more detail on the issue, someone better than I may be able to make some use of it. I can say that whatever is causing this communication issue, though, came into play between Hyperdrive 2 and Hyperdrive 3. I'll just have to stick with 2 Final and test each update as it comes along.

To the devs, anything I can do to help/test, just let me know, this ROM has been great, and I'd love to help out more than just the donations.