Fast Pair is a pretty nifty service that Google has had up their sleeve for a few years at this point. While it has been around since 2017 technically, the actual implementation of Fast Pair has been a bit slow and hit-or-miss across the board. While many Android phones have taken advantage of it for a while at this point, not having it work on your Chromebook at the same time has been a bit of a bummer. After all, Fast Pair is only interesting when it works across a family of devices, and ChromeOS being out of that loop has been frustrating.
ChromeOS 111 brings Fast Pair to Chromebooks…sort of
With the arrival of ChromeOS 111, Fast Pair has officially landed on Chromebooks, though you’ll need to take one additional step for now to actually use it. For right now, that additional step is simple enough: you need to go to your flags (chrome://flags), search for Fast Pair, and enable the main Fast Pair flag (#fast-pair). A quick restart of Chrome and you’ll be ready to roll.
Once fully enabled, it’s been pretty impressive to see Fast Pair working so well. In the end, there are two big pieces of the Fast Pair equation that need to be in place for it to be a difference maker: it needs to help you quickly pair Bluetooth accessories and it needs to share that connection with other devices connected to your Google account.
For my early testing, I used a Google-made product to remove any 3rd-party jank in this process, but it is worth noting that I’ve also had success with the Wyze Buds Pro as well. Using the Pixel Buds A-Series, I unpaired the earbuds from all of my devices, waited a minute, and simply opened up the case. Immediately, both on my phone and my Galaxy S23 Ultra, I saw the Fast Pair toast notification.
As noted in the notification’s description, clicking on connect not only paired up the earbuds quickly, it also made them immediately available on my Galaxy S23 Ultra. Once I closed and re-opened my case, my phone acknowledged that a saved device was available for connection, and after clicking through the various prompts, the Pixel Buds A-Series were also fully ready on my phone, too. Not once did I have to worry with pairing modes, Bluetooth menus, or other standard Bluetooth pairing steps we’re all accustom to at this point.
Since the Pixel Buds A-Series have the ability to connect to multiple devices without the need to manually disconnect beforehand, I can now quickly jump between my Chromebook and phone with a single click from the Bluetooth menu on either device. While the ability to seamlessly move back and forth between the two devices with no clicks or interaction isn’t quite there (this should be capable with something like the Pixel Buds Pro down the road), I’m actually quite fine with manually switching my connections when needed as long as I can simply hit the connect button and move on.
My guess is Fast Pair will continue building on this continuity over time and I’d hope that things will eventually become so cohesive that your connected earbuds simply become an output option, no different that choosing whether or not my Chromebook audio comes from the internal speakers or my connected display. For now, the ease of moving back and forth between devices and the simplicity of the pairing process is a nice thing to have, and I’m hoping that an incremental update in ChromeOS 111 will arrive soon to make this widely available for all users without the need of the feature flag.
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