Worth Reading?
+5 [7 votes]
So the people at Palm were kind enough to send me their latest Bluetooth headset offering, the Series 3, for review. I have had it for about 2 weeks and I have been using it a lot, primarily with my Helio Fin, but I paired it with the Centro I have here too.
It works amazingly well. I truly was impressed, I have a Jawbone sitting around here, and the Palm, in my opinion, worked better than it. Part of that was due to the fact that the Palm headset has easy to use buttons, where as with the Jawbone I had to nearly drive the damn thing into my skull.
The other part comes from the fact that the Palm had better call quality, the Jawbone was a second hand device that I fear may have been mishandled before I got it, so it might have worked better for me out of the box as far as call quality goes, but the Palm’s call quality was amazing, provided I didn’t get too far away from the device. I don’t know what the advertised distance for the Palm headset is, but it worked really well at a range of up to about 15 feet, past that, it still worked, but there would be little clicks.
The battery life is good, I didn’t time it, but I used it moderately for about 3 days and still didn’t have to charge it, I just plugged it in because I thought it might be getting close. Now, onto how it felt to wear it.
Wearing the headset without the ear loop was fine, as long as I was sitting in front of my computer, if I went to actually do anything, it would fall out constantly, it might just be me though, because I can’t even get my iPod ear buds to stay in, but it was comfortable to wear with or without the ear loop. It comes with a few different in-ear gel-pad things for different sized ears, and you can easily switch ears with a simple twist of the ear-pad thing and then put it in the other ear.
Like I said, I liked it, it was easy to use, not heavy, or too large, and it lasted a surprising amount of time. It sounded good, and at about $70 you could do a lot worse, I still don’t like that it doesn’t come with a charger, but as long as you have a Treo or Palm Centro you should be set. I give it a 3.5 out of 5 gears.
Rating:
No, you’re right. Jawbones are overpriced and *hugely* overrated, and kind of huge physically to boot. I had one and couldn’t keep it snug and comfortable in my ear canal, no matter what insert I used. Sound quality was tinny and most everything I heard had a fake synthesized quality.
But the question I have is which headset costs less — the Palm “Series 3″ or the original Plantronics Discovery 650E that it’s a near carbon copy of? =) The Palm “retails” for less to begin with at $69 but is only available directly from Palm. The 650E on the other hand starts at nearly twice the price but can be found discounted to less than $60.
My old Plantronics Discovery 610 was one of the best headsets I ever owned or used — biggest problem was when the rotating bit of the ear insert wouldn’t stay in place (it traveled a good amount of time being abused in my front pants pocket). Its second and final downfall came when I lost the damn thing.