I have several Bluetooth devices that I use with my phone and Tablet.
I was having trouble getting my phone to connect with the Bluetooth speaker. I finally remembered my Tablet was turned on. 
It’s such a nuisance to either turn off bluetooth or shut the device completely off.
Is there a better way to resolve bluetooth connections?
Normally I use the speaker with my tablet. Today I wanted to listen to some music that’s stored on my phone. I haven’t copied it to the Tablet. The tablet immediately connected to the Speaker and my phone couldn’t connect.
Newer bluetooth devices can pair to more than one master. But, if you have an older device, your only solution is to disconnect from the currently connected device, as you are doing.
Thank you for your reply.
My bluetooth devices aren’t very old. But they don’t work when two devices try to connect. My phone may be the culprit. It was an older model when I bought it.
It’s a mess. It really varies from device to device, and there’s no standard advice that will always work. Even with devices that can pair to two things, they don’t always do a sane thing when both are present.
I have four BT devices, two outputs (phone & MP3 player) & two inputs (headset & car); they pair the way they want to, even when I got a new phone & paired the headset to the phone before pairing the car.
If I’m talking on the phone/headset & get in the car, the car ‘steals’ the pairing such that I’m now talking over the car’s speakers instead of the headset. When I turn off the car, I either need to turn off/on the headset or pull out the phone & go into the BT menu & manually reconnect the headset otherwise it reverts to ‘phone’ mode (as if I’m holding it up to my ear) even though it’s been in some pocket the entire conversation.
If I want to use the MP3/headset combo I need to either turn off BT on the phone or wait until I’m far enough away from it that the headset is out of BT range of the phone to turn both on; again, the headset was first paired to the MP3 before the phone, which rules out original pairing order as what it’s reverting to.
Any way to get either of these behaviors to change?
You’re describing the same bluetooth problems that I encounter.
It can be very frustrating when the wrong device connects by bluetooth.
I try to keep bluetooth turned off on my phone. I’ll even go into setup and delete a device that shouldn’t connect to my phone.
Android setup
Look under previously connected devices and press forget. That helps because the phone doesn’t automatically steal the connection to that device. You have to press scan to find the device again.
Sadly, not reliably. BT kinda sucks in a lot of ways, and many of the ways in which it sucks are coded into car infotainment systems that will never be updated.
I don’t envy the BT developers. Like, somewhere at Google, every time they make a new Android rev, someone has to go test it against the absurdly outdated and buggy version that shipped with the 2009 Ford Fiesta. And I bet that the parameters for that test is a lot closer to “does it crash the phone or the car?” than “does it seamlessly handle handoffs to some other bluetooth device?”
And, honestly, even new devices aren’t doing a bang-up job at this.