Only worked for two days and not up to specifications

I had been putting off buying a Bluetooth headset for a long time. For the past two years I have used a stereo wired headset. Since I spend so much time on the cell phone (around 3500 minutes per month) I had to have some type of hands-free solution. Each morning I would clip the phone holster on my belt and thread the headphone wire under my shirt and out my collar. This got to be a pain and eventually the 2.5mm socket on the cell phone started to get loose.

One of the main reasons I stayed with the wired headset was that the microphone was actually positioned in front of my mouth. I had tried other wired headsets like the Jabra over the years and found that most that did not place the microphone close to the mouth did not work well. If I was close to a hard surface and spoke loudly it was OK but otherwise not. I got tired of conversations where the person on the other end was constantly saying "What? Huh? I can't understand you."

With the large number of people I see these days with the blue flashing Borg hardware on their heads I figured that the technology has to have improved. When I found these at Costco for $49 I thought it would be worth a try.

Motorola claims six hour talk time and 130 hours standby time with this headset so it seemed it would work for me. I took it home and plugged it into the charger. After a little over an hour the led changed to green, indicating a full charge.

It paired with my phone immediately and I made a few calls to friends to test it. This was done in my office at the house. Everyone said they could hear me OK. With that, I assumed I would be happy with this headset and was good to go. The next day I was leaving on a trip so this would be a good test (airports, hours driving in a rental car, etc.).

The first problem turned out to be battery life. After about 1-1/2 hours talk time the second day the voice quality got really bad. It sounded "staticy" like an analog radio. As soon as I recharged the problem went away. I figured that the battery would just need a few cycles before I could expect full life. However, I was concerned at how much shorter the life was than the advertised life.

The trip was two days and I spent the third day at airports and returning the rental car, etc. On this day I had talked a little less than two hours and had to recharged the headset. I then talked another hour or so. At this point the real problems began. When I got back to my home airport I got a call from a friend who just got a new cell phone. I hit the answer button on the headset and said "hello". The guy couldn't hear me at all. I heard a couple of "Hello? Hello? Hello?" and then he hung up. At first I wrote this off to him having Cricket service with a cheapo phone. Later I got calls from two more people with the same result.

I assumed this might be a low battery issue so I recharged the headset again. It then worked for a couple of short calls and then stopped again. On the first call, I used it to voice dial and then I talked for a few seconds to a receptionist at a business. She transferred me to the department I asked for but when the person picked up, he could not hear me at all and finally hung up.

In conclusion, I definitely cannot recomend this headset for anyone. I used to think highly of Motorola but after the last two cell phones I've owned before and now this headset I won't touch another Motorola product.

The reliability of this headset is of course the biggest issue, but I also have a problem with the way it works when the battery is low. In my opinion, if the battery is too low for a reliable connection, the headset shoud beep or change the led color and not ocnnect rather than answering the call but allowing no voice through at all.

I think I'll look at other manufacturers for a Bluetooth headset.