Bluetooth Headset Roundup

Faeton writes " HowardChui.com has 5 nifty Bluetooth cellphone headsets reviewed. Looks like we're moving towards the StarTrek Comm unit (check out the size of the Nextlink Bluespoon Digital headset!)"

Prices?

[blackmonday]

I liked the round-up but what matters to me most is price, and I could not find price info anywhere. How much do these things cost?

Bluetooth vs. 802.11b

[Anonymous Coward]

I have been doing some modifications to 802.11b notebook cards, namely to increase the potential range of receiving connections... for purely legitimate purposes, of course *cough*
Anywho- I was wondering what sorts of antennae mods could be used to increase the range of bluetooth signals...
A lot of the new cell phones have bluetooth connectivity, I was wondering what sort of fun could be had with a bluetooth sniffing program, or a jammer, for that manner...

filtering background noise?

[at_kernel_99]

Yeah, but which one works well when driving down the freeway in a topless jeep with the (mud) tires howling at 75mph?

Bluetooth and Regular Landline Phones

[computerme]

Hi.

Can anyone point me to links that will tell me when i will be able to use bluetooth headsets such as my jabra earphone that he reviewed with REGULAR phones. Either thru and adapter or a new phone.

Thank you...

StarTrek Comm unit

[FreeLinux]

A closer example of a Start Trek Comm unit would be this [vocera.com] unit from Vocera. Of course, there is also the Nextel system which both behaves and looks [nextel.com] surprisingly similar to the communicators from the original Star Trek series.

No difference

[Stashia*]

These devices will not do much to lessen the distraction drivers have when talking on their mobiles.

The issue is the immediacy of the mobile phone conversation. It diverts the attention that a driver needs to be placing elsewhere.

http://cartalk.cars.com/About/Drive-Now/scientif ic -evidence.html

Studies have shown that there is negligible difference in the increased accident probability for users of these devices as opposed to hand-helds.

If you need to take a call on your commute, do us all a favor and pull over!

what about the m3000

[Anonymous Coward]

This was a nice review, but I'm curious how all of these perform next to the Plantronics M3000 that's supposed to blow the rest away. This one's supposed to have a battery life of 10 hours. Anyone have any insight on this?

http://www.plantronics.com/north_america/en_US/c at alog/display_product_detail.jhtml?rootId=cat115005 7&productTypeId=cat1150057&prodId=prod4960008#

Interoperability

[neglige]

A major problem Bluetooth is currently facing is interoperability. During the test it seems that some of the headsets were paired with different phones, but they were mostly Nokia phones (which supposedly do not differ too much when it comes to the BT implementation).

Buying one of those earpieces and trying to pair it with your [fill in brand here unless Nokia] phone could be difficult. Not to mention the BT dongle for the PC. If you were hoping for a hands-free headset that gives you more Counterstrike kills, you'll probably find that your dongle does not support the necessary profiles [palowireless.com].

Re:Prices?

[martissimo]

The Nextel gets ratings that are as good as the Bluespoon and comes in at about a third of the price ;)

Re:Bluetooth vs. 802.11b

[neglige]

I was wondering what sort of fun could be had with a bluetooth sniffing program

Since Bluetooth offers a service/device discovery mode, you don't need any special software. Simply check for mobile devices in your neighbourhood. Worked like a charm at the last CeBit in Hannover: someone had a BT-Internet Access Point, no password required... I decided not to buy those WLAN voucher and happily surfed with my iPAQ. And of course you can always find a friendly phone that announces its presence and decide to do funny things with it.

Very interesting study.

[FreeLinux]

I saw this article [newsday.com] today and found it very interesting. For all the screaming about the dangers of driving while using cell phones (obviously there are dangers), the AAA study found cell phones to be much lower on the list of problems than one might expect. Far more problems were cause by some very mundane things that I am sure we are all guilty of at some time or another. Notice the statistics at the bottom of the article.

will these work with bluetooth enabled PCs?

[troutsoup]

i've wondered about these bluetooth headsets, will they work with a PC that has a bluetooth base???

Nice review

[Hecatonchires]

I liked and understood his review. He clearly stated his benchmarking process, and included tests of things real people do. He made mention of things that normal people find annoying. The bit about 'my father has a large ear canal' made me laugh.

If only more video card reviews were like this.

Screw cell phones

[droleary]

Am I the only one that would love a Bluetooth headset for my computer? I use Mac OS X and have a number of speakable items, and it would be a great boon if I could I use a headset as the exclusive input/output for spoken commands. Why do I never see a single one of these things even make an effort at breaking into the desktop market?

Against BlueTooth Headsets

[Keith Gabryelski]

yeah, i look like like a 6' 3" shaved head borg with the sony/ericsson ear piece (which is priceless) but... man what a pain in the butt.

you have to recharge the thing... and i don't know about you -- but i barely get the time to charge my phone as needed. it's also unfortunate you can't chain together charging devices like this -- but that is a whole different gripe.

you have to work with a new interface on the damn ear piece to answer the phone (or send the call back to phone) which is a hurdle. yeah laugh away smart boy... try three of these devices and for a few months and drop one important call and you will never use it again.

because of artifacts of digital transmission (jitter buffers and individual buffer sample size) the use of blue tooth headsets increases the end to end delay over a sometimes already intollerable cellphone network delay.

the price is insane.

reception with the phone is not perfect. I don't understand everything about interference but there is a lot of it... and, again, if you are on an important call you and can't hear the other person you are likely to just drop this thing in the trash.

blueTooth's transmission wave length is in the range of microwaves (i.e. water heating range). why would anyone want that radiation near their brain.

to sum up: save your money...

Re:No difference

[Moofie]

Until these studies control for accidents that occur when the driver is speaking with a passenger, they will be unconvincing to me.

If talking to people is dangerous, drivers should be forced to wear gags.

Re:Prices?

[rodgerd]

It wouldn't be at all pointless for me - I'm hanging out for bluetooth equipped crash helmets. No dangling cords from helmet to motorcycle for intercom devices.

A perfect example of why BT is retarded

[macemoneta]

Let's see... the lowest cost unit in the roundup is $70, and it's replacing:

- 3 feet of wire,
- an earphone, and
- a microphone,

which is available at my local dollar store. Yes, for one dollar (cash American) I can get the same wired earbud/microphone that came with my Motorola phone (free), except without the logo.

WiFi at least keeps people from having to ruin a perfectly good weekend or two, drilling holes in walls and fishing cables. But Bluetooth???

I've never understood why someone would want to replace a high security, exquisitely simple, low cost device with a complex, battery consuming, expensive, insecure device. It's not like you have the option of running SSH or IPSEC over Bluetooth, even if you wanted to.

Besides, earphones are cool! You wear them with sunglasses and you look like a narc. :-)

clicker

[sammy baby]

I believe with Macs you can control iTunes with the phone (sounds cool) and others are working on getting Winzip to function.

The software you're referring to is called "Clicker [mac.com]," by Salling Software. It can be used not just to control iTunes, but also basically anything else which responds to AppleScript commands.

Note - there is a non-zero chance that this is completely useless. But it's hella cool. Make sure to watch their video [mac.com] (QuickTime required).

Re:Reference?

[Rolo Tomasi]

What documentation, exactly? Panasonic's docs [panasonic.com] for one, mention no such thing as a memory effect, neither do Sanyo's [sanyo-energy-europe.com], both of which are incidentally the leading manufacturers of NiCd cells. I came across this article on EDN [reed-electronics.com], which doesn't give many details, though, but this this usenet thread [google.com] sums the issue up pretty well, particularly the last sentence of the last post.