Motorola and Bluetooth Low Energy with custom Bluetooth Low Energy client device

Question

I need to develop an Android application handling the data from a custom built Bluetooth Low Energy client device.

After researching it seems that the best option is to use the API's developed by Motorola for their Android smartphones, but it looks like the Motorola Bluetooth Low Energy API is made to connect only with Motorola bluetooth devices, from the link:

applications can use [the Motorola Bluetooth Low Energy API] to interface with Bluetooth LE (Low Energy) profiles implemented by certain Motorola Mobility devices

Besides the above mentioned API, there is the Motorola Bluetooth Low Energy GATT Framework API, but it is unclear to me whether it is applicable for my needs.

Can anyone here tell me how these API's can be used to achieve my goal or whether there are other options that I haven't realized yet?

Answer 1

Android options for BLE are limited, and this answer may be different at any given point in the future.

Motorola API will only work for Motorola phones. The GATT API will allow you to push data to the GATT and transmit it via ble. HOWEVER Motorola has ONLY extended the HRM profile. Additionally the API stopped working on devices that were updated to ICS (as of 10 days ago this is still the case). They are working to update the API as well as possibly extend the profiles beyond HRM. There have been people that have simply leveraged the HRM profile to shuttle data, but there is currently a 2 octet limit.

There are additional bugs that have been reported as well, that are also supposed to be fixed in the post ICS updates. However since it took them a year to get ICS out to their headsets and all of the Motorola apps are still working, who knows when they'll update the API's.