Results tagged “Bluetooth headsets” from Trying Technology

I've been using Bluetooth headsets with my cell phone for about a year and a half (see my TechWeb review of three headsets), and recently tried out a few more (for an article that isn't up yet), and here's my overall thoughts on the matter (confirmed, or even pointed out first to me, by my colleague Ernest Lilley, editor of TechRevu.com):

• Probably the most important feature is using a standard charging port on the headset, i.e., mini- or micro-USB, which is what Jabra does, and also Plantronics on some, rather than something proprietary, which is what the Aleph Jawbone still does.

Reason: Without the cable, you've got a very small boat anchor (or ear decor). And these cables are easy to lose, misplace, forget to pack, not have on hand, etc., while you can probably get a mini/micro-USB cable at most drug stores. And it's easy to accumulate enough to provision your carry-bag, car, pocket, etc. And a growing number of pocket chargers come with these cables.

• Second, IMHO, is how well the dang thing stays in your ear, which in turn means, is there an ear loop, and how securely is it secured to the earpiece.

I lost one loopless headset a month or two ago, while doing chores in town. I sort of felt it pop out, but I wasn't paying attention, and by the time I realized it had fallen out, and retraced my steps five or six yards back from my car to the copy/ship store, I couldn't find it. No big deal, I've still got several headsets, but it's annoying.

On the Jabra I use a lot (partly because it has a mini-USB charging port, per above), the ear loop sometimes pops off. The Aleph Jawbone's is very securely connected, but (per above) I'm not using the Jawbone as much as I otherwise might.

• Button close to the edge, or whoops, didn't mean to hang up on you. The main button on some is easy to mis-hit, like when I'm adjusting the fit to my ear, and whoops, I've hung up on the call.
• How well can you hear me now? The big problem in selecting a Bluetooth headset is that while the callee may sound fine to you, you can't tell how you sound to them, short of having somebody call you using that headset. (Which Ernest Lilley and I have done many rounds of, often playing "Guess which headset.")

Lastly, a general observation: Be quieter. Pretty much every headset I've tried can pick up my talking at a conversational or even sub-conversational level, so quiet that you wouldn't hear me more than two feet away. I even conducted at least one test call from the stacks of my library, in a semi-whisper, and was heard well enough. You don't have to yell. The same goes for when you're not on a headset. So don't. If you have to talk loud when other people are around, go elsewhere or make your call later.

I got to play withtry out a bunch of interesting products this year, some for review, some by actually buying them, including a few digital cameras (for TechRevu.com), Bluetooth mobile phone headsets (for InformationWeek) and ultralight notebooks from a Lenovo and Panasonic (for eWeek.com).

My favorite hardware is the Aliph Jawbone Bluetooth phone headset, which I tried as part of a three headset review for Information Week. I can easily use this several times a day, particularly when I forward my home office number to my cell phone while walking my dog.

Trying the Jawbone, and other headsets (mostly in "what am I calling from now" chats with fellow techno-tryer Ernest Lilley), yielded one interesting fact: I couldn't directly test the most important aspect, namely, how I sounded. Leaving messages on my answering machine isn't the same as replicating the callee's experience.

The Jawbone suffers from one common design flaw -- unnecessary use of a proprietary -- non-standard -- port, for the charging cable. It's especially annoying as the Jawbone charger cable has easily-bendible wires in it; I managed to gronk the cable and make it unusable. Fortunately, I'd already ordered two spares -- one for my travel kit, and one extra to make the most of the shipping fee. Competitors like Gemma and Plantronics manage to use mini-USB, which would be harder to damage, and easily replaced in any drug or convenience store (or my stash of spare cables).

I've been doing daily data backups pretty regularly, most of the time, to an external hard drive... but have never felt this was sufficient. What if something happens to that drive (which is in my home office, after all)? Not to mention being at risk for up to a day's work.

I recently wrote an article about online data backup services, which save data from one or more of your computers to off-site, and let you retrieve some or all data, including, ideally, to other computers, via a web browser.

More recently, I tried one out, Data Deposit Box... and liked it so much I've stayed on as a user.

Unlike most, possibly all, of the competition, DDB has a simple pricing model -- two dollars per gigabyte per month... for no matter how many (Windows) computers you're saving from. For example, at the moment, I've got two desktops, and one or two notebooks all saving to this account -- of which one machine is very active, the others only sporadically so. With other services, it would be costing some multiple of five to seven bucks per month.

I haven't yet had to rescue any files I lost or deleted -- but I use my Data Deposit Box a lot, as a "USB drive in the sky" -- an easy way to grab a file or two that I'd been editing on my notebook, which might be turned off; grabbing it from the web site is quicker and easier. Or getting a file while at I'm the library (at one of their computers). And I have, come to think of it, used their "versioning" feature, to retrieve a paragraph or three from an earlier version of a file several hours previous. Nifty, recommended. (Tell them I sent you.) (Note, be sure you understand what Data Deposit Box is -- and isn't -- doing, and that while I recommend it highly for work and personal data files, it's not your cheapest bet for saving copies of music, pictures or video.)

I do my own taxes, Schedule C and all. I've been very unhigh tech about it; I journal my entries in pen, in categorized notebook pages, sum up with a calculator. It's far from efficient; discovering that federal forms (but not Massachusetts ones) were available in fill-in-able PDFs a few years made a big difference...but not big enough, the checking, recalculating and correcting is still a royal PITA (pain in the fundament).

This past year, I tried tax software. After due research, I tried H&R Block Tax Cut Pro.

It was cheap enough, by argh, did it suck--incomprehensibly so, for a program that could easily be the one non-Office app many of its users would employ. For example, on the install, it failed to complete, saying "You need to be administrator" -- which I was. Turning off the anti-virus and firewall (ZoneAlarm) -- first disconnecting from the Internet, of course -- resolved this, but this is IMHO an unacceptable and unnecessary complication. (Note, the documentation did mention needing to turn off Microsoft firewalls -- but the error messages didn't suggest alternative reasons.)

TaxCut Pro was such a royally hard to use, down right bad program I was ready to return it and ask for my twenty five bucks back. (I never got around to that, of course.)

Then I ordered a copy of Intuit TurboTax. The Home and Business version cost more than TaxCut Pro, but was much, much better. It's still far from perfect--for example, there's no obvious way to up the font size, short of changing my screen resolution (do they think all their customers have perfect vision), and it's incredibly hard to zoom into a form--in-progress and force a change on a line entry. But it did the trick, so I'm happy enough. Perhaps, now that I'm using automatic online backup, I'll also go to electronic record-keeping.