Jeff Duke

I’ve hung on to my $50 Fry’s birthday gift card for a few months now, occasionally taking it out to look at it and consider… just what should I get with it?

Then, our loving cat, Scarface brought the solution to the decision by chewing my pretty nice Plantronics USB headset cable in two.

Thanks Scarface, jerk.  We named him well, he’s so mean.

Bluetooth was the obvious solution, but which one?  Well, after several reviews and countless looks, I chose the Motorola HT820, which I picked up a few days ago.

It’s really great!

It offers good comfort, but as a glasses wearer, there is a typical longevity of wear issue which pains the ears over time by pinching the ears between the headset and arms of my glasses.  Doesn’t hurt at first, but as those of you out there who wear glasses know, eventually it gets annoying.

The audio quality is very nice for bluetooth, approaching a decent pair of wired headset.  Keep in mind I use a pair of trusty Sony in ear silicon buds, for reference.

The convenience of no wires is just lovely.  I can get up, brush my teeth, walk downstairs and only have minor blips in connection at my furthest travel from the trasmitter.

There is a small problem with connectivity that has come up a few times, where it sort of stutters the audio in and out.  This is relatively easily fixed by rebooting the headphones and allowing it to reconnect.

The big question I had to resolve was how to hook it up and use it.  I initially thought that I’d be able to use them as stereo headphones with a mic, just like my old USB Plantronics headset, but I was wrong, sort of.

Consider the idea that this headset has two separate radio types.  Number 1, it can be a hands free device.  This allows use of the microphone on the headset, but reduces the quality of the audio in the headphones to somewhere around AM/phone audio.  Number 2, it can be a pair of nice quality stereo headphones.

This means that you can’t have the best of both worlds, sadly.  You can’t talk on the mic and listen on the quality stereo headphones at the same time, doing one or the other disables the other until that resource is “released”.

A bit annoying, but I understand the reasons now.

Let me know if you have any questions or comments, maybe you have some tips I haven’t mentioned or thought of.

-J