My former co-worker and awesome person in general, Kirk, had a giant pair of wireless headsets for a long time. Those things were massive. And I think he thoroughly enjoyed using them to listen to music while he worked. Ever since I saw that, I've wanted something similar.
From what I recall, he had a set of Sennheiser RS120s which used RF to communicate between the base station and the headsets. My requirements were a little more involved though. For one, it needed to be able to transmit voice as well. The main reason I wanted a wireless headset was to not be tethered to my laptop when making calls on Skype. Well, most technology out there isn't very conducive to transmitting sound wirelessly though (at least for computer accessories). Enter bluetooth. The bluetooth specs have been around for over a decade, but I feel like it has never quite taken off for computer based technologies. About the only thing that uses it are the wireless mice and keyboards that various vendors hawk for ridiculous prices.
The biggest user of bluetooth by far are mobile phone users who use wireless headsets to make and receive phone calls while driving. They also tend to look a bit geeky, with a shiny blue light flashing from their ear... especially when you run into such a person in the grocery store standing in line ahead of you at the checkout. I found them weird and uncomfortable looking as well, almost like someone glued the thing into your ear.
Anyway, I've been looking and considering a bluetooth based headset for a while now; unfortunately I didn't see anything for a while. Then I ran across the MOTOROKR S9 recently on buy.com for a pretty decent price and I got it. Well, the thing arrived on Wednesday at work. I paired it with my phone and wandered about calling people using it. For one thing, the microphone is embedded somewhere in the thing... so people don't realise you're wearing it at all. And the audio quality is pretty decent.
After I got home, I spent the next few hours wrestling with it, trying to get it to pair properly with my laptop which has the Dell TrueMobile 355 (I think its an OEM Broadcomm bluetooth chip) BT chip in it. It would pair up, but then it was useless. I couldn't send stereo audio out to it and far more importantly, I couldn't use it to make Skype calls. I was super frustrated with it. After reading a whole bunch of pages off google and trying to install various dell drivers, I landed on this page which had links to updated Dell drivers for Windows XP to enable the Widcomm drivers for BT on XP.
Even though the compatibility list that Dell had didn't match up with my laptop (I have an Inspiron E1405), the chip was the same, so I figured I'd give it a go. I installed, restarted and viola, my existing BT mouse stopped working! It kept flashing blue, trying in vain to pair to my laptop. I tried to re-add the mouse and the headset, but no such luck. That worried me because I thought I screwed up BT for good with the non-supported driver... More fiddling with the Control Panel took me to a place where I could enable the other (Widcomm) Bluetooth system tray icon. All of a sudden, I was able to search and add my mouse and headset. Success! It also had a checkbox in the configuration that said to allow Skype to communicate with the wireless headset. Sweet! I fired up iTunes, but it played music through the speakers on the computer instead of the wireless headset. I tried fiddling around with iTunes based settings, but no luck there either. Then I changed the default audio device on the machine itself to the stereo bluetooth headset. And guess what? After restarting iTunes, it worked! I could now hear music wirelessly in stereo. Excited, I took a trip to the kitchen to get a glass of water... while listening to my music wirelessly. Note that I can also skip songs, increase or decrease volume, pause playback etc through the headset itself.
Once the stereo audio part was working, I tried fiddling with Skype. Skype lets you decide what audio device(s) to send sound to and what device to get audio from. I chose the stereo BT device for audio out and the wireless BT headset (not stereo, only the left ear) for audio in. That didn't work well. I couldn't hear anything once Skype started 'dialling'. So I had to switch all of Skype to the non-stereo BT headset device. That worked fine, I tried the Echo test service and then I called myself at work and left myself a voicemail. Our updated corporate voicemail network will now email you a wav file of the voicemail right away! So I got the voicemail wav file on my BlackBerry and I played it back from the phone itself. Pretty cool eh?
So now onto the issues with it. There is a bit of lag sometimes and cutouts in audio when I sit at my desk. Its kind of like back in the days when you used dial-up and listened to real player audio files that would pause to buffer itself sometimes. Kind of annoying. Maybe its not that bad, I am just not so tolerant anymore of sluggishness from technology I suppose. If you never used dial-up, darn you! The fit is comfortable enough I suppose, though because these are in-ear headsets, I feel like someone has stuck their fingers into my ear and left them there permanently. One annoyance is that the phone calls via Skype and via my cell phone both use just one speaker (the left one) for me to listen to sound. It would be awesome if I could hear in Stereo. Well guess what? There's the s9-HD which does just that! Mind you, your cell phone needs to support advanced audio distribution profile (A2DP) for this feature to work when you use the S9-HD as a wireless headset for the phone. Another annoyance has to do with my phone itself; it won't send media audio (music, videos) to bluetooth devices. Not that I use my phone to listen to music or anything. I hear newer BlackBerries support it though. Note that the HD version costs about twice as much right now. One other minor issue is the redness of the headset itself... it looks a bit strange being red and having a blue light flash on your neck... but I can't really see that, people have pointed that out to me.
Now, why is all this cool? Well, like I said, my main intention was to use this to make Skype calls without being tied down. It gets better though, thanks to Apple. Why? Well, they released the Skype application for the iPhone and iPod touch a couple of days back. Hooray right? Well, what you may not yet know is that the iPod touch (2nd generation) has a bluetooth chip built in it as well that Apple has somewhat hampered/screwed with. Once version 3.0 of the iPhone OS is released, you should be able to use the BT chip to pair it with regular BT devices. There are plenty of threads out there about people complaining that Apple is making you pay to use a hardware piece that already existed since version 2.0 of the OS. Apparently, Apple is going to charge people with iPod touches an extra $10 to 'unlock' the bluetooth feature, which sounds like a cash grab. What is not clear to me is whether that is just the OS update or an additional $10 just for the BT feature in addition to the $9.95 to upgrade to OS 3.0. I am sure people will pay it for the features though... and in the grand scheme of things, this is definitely one way to make money off hardware you already sold (if you are the manufacturer that is). Not too expensive and with usable features... why not eh. I would still prefer it free, but whatever.
Anyway, so the coolest part for me is this: once an iPod touch has OS 3.0, guess what? Install the Skype application, pair it with these wireless headsets and what do you have? A somewhat portable and wireless Skype enabled device. Now you can skip the computer all together! I for one am super excited about this. I've been debating and vacillating about getting a second generation iPod touch, but Apple keeps making it harder. They keep improving... and making me wait. I mean, once they release OS 3.0, I am sure they will release a newer version of the hardware for the iPhone for OS 4.0 or 3.1 or whatever... with even better features (better screen, better battery or something) and I will wait for the iPod touch version of that.
I am not going to replace my BlackBerry for an iPhone anytime soon... that's a whole other set of posts about why the berry is superior to the iPhone. But for now, the Skype application and the ability to pair with stereo headsets brings up a whole new world of use for both the headsets and the iPod touch itself. I guess I can wait till the end of June/July for Apple to release 3.0 and then wait to see what Apple will tell us all about how they are building even better hardware for the next generation iPhone/iPod touch.
From what I recall, he had a set of Sennheiser RS120s which used RF to communicate between the base station and the headsets. My requirements were a little more involved though. For one, it needed to be able to transmit voice as well. The main reason I wanted a wireless headset was to not be tethered to my laptop when making calls on Skype. Well, most technology out there isn't very conducive to transmitting sound wirelessly though (at least for computer accessories). Enter bluetooth. The bluetooth specs have been around for over a decade, but I feel like it has never quite taken off for computer based technologies. About the only thing that uses it are the wireless mice and keyboards that various vendors hawk for ridiculous prices.
The biggest user of bluetooth by far are mobile phone users who use wireless headsets to make and receive phone calls while driving. They also tend to look a bit geeky, with a shiny blue light flashing from their ear... especially when you run into such a person in the grocery store standing in line ahead of you at the checkout. I found them weird and uncomfortable looking as well, almost like someone glued the thing into your ear.
Anyway, I've been looking and considering a bluetooth based headset for a while now; unfortunately I didn't see anything for a while. Then I ran across the MOTOROKR S9 recently on buy.com for a pretty decent price and I got it. Well, the thing arrived on Wednesday at work. I paired it with my phone and wandered about calling people using it. For one thing, the microphone is embedded somewhere in the thing... so people don't realise you're wearing it at all. And the audio quality is pretty decent.
After I got home, I spent the next few hours wrestling with it, trying to get it to pair properly with my laptop which has the Dell TrueMobile 355 (I think its an OEM Broadcomm bluetooth chip) BT chip in it. It would pair up, but then it was useless. I couldn't send stereo audio out to it and far more importantly, I couldn't use it to make Skype calls. I was super frustrated with it. After reading a whole bunch of pages off google and trying to install various dell drivers, I landed on this page which had links to updated Dell drivers for Windows XP to enable the Widcomm drivers for BT on XP.
Even though the compatibility list that Dell had didn't match up with my laptop (I have an Inspiron E1405), the chip was the same, so I figured I'd give it a go. I installed, restarted and viola, my existing BT mouse stopped working! It kept flashing blue, trying in vain to pair to my laptop. I tried to re-add the mouse and the headset, but no such luck. That worried me because I thought I screwed up BT for good with the non-supported driver... More fiddling with the Control Panel took me to a place where I could enable the other (Widcomm) Bluetooth system tray icon. All of a sudden, I was able to search and add my mouse and headset. Success! It also had a checkbox in the configuration that said to allow Skype to communicate with the wireless headset. Sweet! I fired up iTunes, but it played music through the speakers on the computer instead of the wireless headset. I tried fiddling around with iTunes based settings, but no luck there either. Then I changed the default audio device on the machine itself to the stereo bluetooth headset. And guess what? After restarting iTunes, it worked! I could now hear music wirelessly in stereo. Excited, I took a trip to the kitchen to get a glass of water... while listening to my music wirelessly. Note that I can also skip songs, increase or decrease volume, pause playback etc through the headset itself.
Once the stereo audio part was working, I tried fiddling with Skype. Skype lets you decide what audio device(s) to send sound to and what device to get audio from. I chose the stereo BT device for audio out and the wireless BT headset (not stereo, only the left ear) for audio in. That didn't work well. I couldn't hear anything once Skype started 'dialling'. So I had to switch all of Skype to the non-stereo BT headset device. That worked fine, I tried the Echo test service and then I called myself at work and left myself a voicemail. Our updated corporate voicemail network will now email you a wav file of the voicemail right away! So I got the voicemail wav file on my BlackBerry and I played it back from the phone itself. Pretty cool eh?
So now onto the issues with it. There is a bit of lag sometimes and cutouts in audio when I sit at my desk. Its kind of like back in the days when you used dial-up and listened to real player audio files that would pause to buffer itself sometimes. Kind of annoying. Maybe its not that bad, I am just not so tolerant anymore of sluggishness from technology I suppose. If you never used dial-up, darn you! The fit is comfortable enough I suppose, though because these are in-ear headsets, I feel like someone has stuck their fingers into my ear and left them there permanently. One annoyance is that the phone calls via Skype and via my cell phone both use just one speaker (the left one) for me to listen to sound. It would be awesome if I could hear in Stereo. Well guess what? There's the s9-HD which does just that! Mind you, your cell phone needs to support advanced audio distribution profile (A2DP) for this feature to work when you use the S9-HD as a wireless headset for the phone. Another annoyance has to do with my phone itself; it won't send media audio (music, videos) to bluetooth devices. Not that I use my phone to listen to music or anything. I hear newer BlackBerries support it though. Note that the HD version costs about twice as much right now. One other minor issue is the redness of the headset itself... it looks a bit strange being red and having a blue light flash on your neck... but I can't really see that, people have pointed that out to me.
Now, why is all this cool? Well, like I said, my main intention was to use this to make Skype calls without being tied down. It gets better though, thanks to Apple. Why? Well, they released the Skype application for the iPhone and iPod touch a couple of days back. Hooray right? Well, what you may not yet know is that the iPod touch (2nd generation) has a bluetooth chip built in it as well that Apple has somewhat hampered/screwed with. Once version 3.0 of the iPhone OS is released, you should be able to use the BT chip to pair it with regular BT devices. There are plenty of threads out there about people complaining that Apple is making you pay to use a hardware piece that already existed since version 2.0 of the OS. Apparently, Apple is going to charge people with iPod touches an extra $10 to 'unlock' the bluetooth feature, which sounds like a cash grab. What is not clear to me is whether that is just the OS update or an additional $10 just for the BT feature in addition to the $9.95 to upgrade to OS 3.0. I am sure people will pay it for the features though... and in the grand scheme of things, this is definitely one way to make money off hardware you already sold (if you are the manufacturer that is). Not too expensive and with usable features... why not eh. I would still prefer it free, but whatever.
Anyway, so the coolest part for me is this: once an iPod touch has OS 3.0, guess what? Install the Skype application, pair it with these wireless headsets and what do you have? A somewhat portable and wireless Skype enabled device. Now you can skip the computer all together! I for one am super excited about this. I've been debating and vacillating about getting a second generation iPod touch, but Apple keeps making it harder. They keep improving... and making me wait. I mean, once they release OS 3.0, I am sure they will release a newer version of the hardware for the iPhone for OS 4.0 or 3.1 or whatever... with even better features (better screen, better battery or something) and I will wait for the iPod touch version of that.
I am not going to replace my BlackBerry for an iPhone anytime soon... that's a whole other set of posts about why the berry is superior to the iPhone. But for now, the Skype application and the ability to pair with stereo headsets brings up a whole new world of use for both the headsets and the iPod touch itself. I guess I can wait till the end of June/July for Apple to release 3.0 and then wait to see what Apple will tell us all about how they are building even better hardware for the next generation iPhone/iPod touch.
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