Ionic not pairing with Jabra Elite Active headphones

[TVgolf]

Ionic finds Jabra Elite's but will not pair.  Jabra's pair quickly with S8.  Have turned off bluetooth on phone and desktop.  Have restarted Ionic.  No luck.  Any help would be appreciated.

[SantiR]

@TVgolf Welcome to the Fitbit forums! Thanks for taking the time to post the situation you are experiencing with your Bluetooth headphones not pairing with Ionic. Thanks for restarting your watch in order to sort this out.

Are your Jabra's into pairing mode? 

Also, by any chance, are you able to remove the Jabra's from Ionic Bluetooth list? If you are able to do this please restart the watch again after doing so. Then, add the Jabra's again and try to pair them.

Hope this helps. Keep me posted! 

[TVgolf]

The Jabra's are not showing as paired on my Ionic so I can't remove.

[Maximillianrg]

I'm struggling with this same issue.  If I pair my Jabra with my Ionic it works but if I pair another device with the Jabra OR I turn bluetooth off on my Ionic and back on, the Ionic remembers the Jabra but produces the error "cannot find device" and if I do not reset the Jabra I will get a "connection failed" when trying to repair.

One trick that sometimes works is to turn bluetooth off and on, in the Ionic bluetooth settings  and then rather than click on the Jabra in the bluetooth settings, press the multi button once on the Jabra and then it will say "device connected" and if that does not work press the multi button again

Steps to re-produce the issue

1. Put Jabra in pairing mode

2. Set Ionic to pairing mode > click Jabra in menu and it says "Paired"

3. Change Bluetooth setting on Ionic from pair to off (Jabra says "no device connected)

4. Change Bluetooth setting on Ionic from off to on

5. Press multi button on Jabra once (Jabra says connected)

Steps to Resolve the issue

1. Remove Jabra from Ionic Bluetooth settings

2. Turn Ionic bluetooth off

3. Factory reset jabra (on elite active hold right button till it flashes purple)

4. Put Jabra in pairing mode

5. Put ionic in paring mode

6. Pair

I spoke with fitbit and they were useless saying that since the Jabra is BT5 and their watch is BT4 that the Jabra must be getting confused and to follow the troubleshooting steps on their web site which is basically the above steps.   I then called Jabra and they were much better and they believe the issue is with the ionic.   The good news is it does not look like the factory  reset on the Jabra deletes the updated firmware.

[Whistler888 · Accepted solution]

Yes good call on this.  I noted this as well a couple times.

No doubt the Elite Active can have difficultly pairing and re-pairing for some odd reason.  Tech Support was somewhat confused -> as the guy never even heard of Jabra.  Switching to another bluetooth device initially caused problems finding the Jabra device again -> even tho it was on the Ionic list of previously paired devices.  In one early instance it was paired and suddenly vanished off the list.  Yeah simply went poof and disappeared off the list.  That got me to call Tech Support in the first place.  That was very weird indeed.  Did the purple reset and the Tech Support guy thanked me.  He had no clue nor the tech guy he referred to when he put me on hold.  But a few hours later the Jabras failed to pair again.

So did a full reinstall back to new and reset the Jabras again.  Then only paired the Jabras.  Let that settle in -> then carefully added a number of other bluetooth devices over time.  Checking to see if all was good one by one.  Right now the Jabras have not lost pairing even tho being double paired to other Android or Apple devices.  Has been days now,  Interestingly the Jabra is one of only a few devices that allows double pairing.

Basically you can pair the Jabras -> but they do not pair or hold pairing as well as other devices like Sony or Beats or JBL or Outdoor Tech.  Hopefully some additional code will be added soon so others can pair this Jabra device without problems.  Bottom line is you can actually pair the Active to the Ionic but you may experience some difficulty.

[TVgolf]

Came to the same successful conclusion yesterday after hours with Ionic and Jabra tech support with no resolution.  Completely, uninstalled all Ionic and Jabra apps and did factory resets to both.  Reinstalled everything from scratch and was able to pair them.  So far everything is good.

[Whistler888]

Sweet.

Mine have paired fine for a number of days now.  The Ionic and Jabras seem to be finally getting along.

[SantiR]

@TVgolf Thanks for your reply and for sharing those details about the workaround that helped you out to get this resolved. I'm very glad you got them paired!

@Maximillianrg Welcome to the Fitbit Community! Thank you very much for taking the time to share the solution to this situation. I'm glad that you found some good support there. 

I'm sure those steps will be very helpful for other user's too; so I will copy and paste them here as well:

Steps to Resolve the issue:

1. Remove Jabra from Ionic Bluetooth settings

2. Turn Ionic bluetooth off

3. Factory reset jabra (on elite active hold right button till it flashes purple)

4. Put Jabra in pairing mode

5. Put ionic in paring mode

6. Pair

@Whistler888 I hope you're doing well! Thanks for sharing the experience you had with this. I'm really glad the Bluetooth headphones had not lost connection. Thanks for sharing all of those insights, I'm sure this will be helpful for other users as well.

Keep me posted! 

[Whistler888]

“@Whistler888 I hope you're doing well! Thanks for sharing the experience you had with this. I'm really glad the Bluetooth headphones had not lost connection. Thanks for sharing all of those insights, I'm sure this will be helpful for other users as well.”

Thanks Santi.  Yes the Jabras have held strong.  As well have loaded all my other bluetooth devices back into the Ionic again.  All work except for a very old 2.0 version bluetooth Plantronics headphone.  It was one of the very first Bluetooth devices used with my old flip Samsung for music.  Haha.

It seems if starting from fresh -> the Jabras can pair and stay paired.  If loading Jabras “after other BT devices have paired” the Ionic can lose Jabra pairing.  Tech Support thought it might have been due to the 5.0 on the Jabras vs 4.0 on the Ionic.  As noted the Jabras were a brand they were completely unfamiliar with.

Another catch is the Jabras can double pair to 2 devices simultaneously.  This might also have been part of the problem.  Nevertheless the Jabras and Ionic have not lost pairing since.  

It seems as long as the Ionic is not pushed to the limit in exercise mode with music and headphones playing -> it will not crash.  Hopefully the replacement watch will not crash under these sorts of “normal use conditions” for me.

Interestingly even tho the Ionic loses the exercise data on the watch when a crash occurs -> the “lost” data actually shows up on the Dashboard when the watch is synced to Fitbit.  That way Tech Support knew exactly when the crash occurred.  Plus under what circumstances etc.  Pretty sure this is very useful data for Fitbit to improve this watch and other devices.

[YojanaFitbit]

Hope you are doing great and enjoying some healthy activities @Whistler888.

We're glad to see you around, thank you for the thorough feedback for the Fitbit Ionic, user experience is very valuable for us. In this way we can improve our features.

Thanks again and let us know if you need anything else.

[ajb75]

Hello. Just a quick question from the list on solutions . How do you turn bluetooth off on fitbit ionic.?.

As I'm currently going through the motions of trying to pair jabra elite ear buds to watch.

Cheers

Andy 

[Maximillianrg]

How to Turn Bluetooth on / off on Ionic

1. Click left button so clock face is showing

2. Scroll Left on screen until you see the Gear icon (settings) and click on it

3. Scroll up on the screen till you see Bluetooth Connection Options and click on it

4. Scroll up and you will see a blue font in the bottom right corner that says on, pair, or off

5. Pressing on the blue font toggles you between Bluetooth on, off, or in pairing mode

Note: In some cases when you change the Bluetooth mode from pair to off to on after you have paired the Jabra, the ionic will not reconnect to the Jabra an you have to unpair, factory reset the Jabra and start over.   In most cases if you leave the Ionic in par mode you can stream music to the Jabra.

[jforshe]

Thanks so much! This solution worked very easily for me! I only bought the jabras for use with the fitbit,  paired with the phone first as it walks you through it. As soon as i unpaired the phone,  the fitbit and jabras paired perfectly. Now if i can just get them to settle in my ears!