This is the second part of the review. Yesterday we introduced the Motorola S9 review of the wireless headphones and covered the remote media controls.
Use as a phone headset
Pressing the call button when you’re listening to music automatically pauses the track and any voice-dialling commands that you utter are passed over to the handset, dialling the number, if configured.
If you’re listening to music and a call comes in, there’s an alert sound in your ear and you simply press the centre button on the left of the headset to take the call.
Interestingly, the phone calls are only routed to the left earphone, we assume because this helps you differentiate between music and a phone call.
We found that people that we spoke to using the S9s as a remote headset found it difficult to hear what we were saying to the point where we had to resort to turning off the bluetooth and using the handset for phone calls.
A few problems
Of late we’ve experienced a few problems.
One of the rubber ear fittings fell off in the journey between where it was stored in our bag and our head – it had done this once before but we’d managed to retrieve it. Luckily the headset we had came with two other pairs of rubber fittings, which are, out of interest, different shapes.
The second problem is more serious, but looks like it’s handset related. Literally in the last couple of days the headset has failed to make connection to the music player to listen to music on them.
When we bluetooth-pair the headset with a Blackberry Curve, it only declares that it’s able to act as a handsfree device. Gone is the ability to listen to music and let the headset act as a media controller – a major problem when you want to listen to music.
Despite deleting the device from the Blackberry Curve we been using the S9s with and reinstalling it, it still won’t play ball with us.
Since then, we’ve been using is successfully with an LG Secret with any problems, so we’re putting it down to the Curve having a mini-freak out.
Infrequent lost of connection
Given we keep our music playing phone in our back pocket, we didn’t expects to suffer with a loss of connection between the two – and every time we used them, but one we didn’t have a problem.
The only time we did was on a really old, two-carriage electric train (between Carlisle and Whitehaven, if you’re interested), that we suspect was leaking loads of electrical noise, interfering with the Bluetooth functioning.
The headset we had only charged from the supplied power supply, which given it was a mains power supply with a mini-USB connection at the end, made this all the more surprising.
Other USB leads we tried from a computers USB port and main to mini-USB connections wouldn’t charge. The downside of this is that it makes taking them away a bit of a pain as you have to take the specific S9 power supply too.
Conclusion
We think Stereo Bluetooth headsets are going to be big – why wouldn’t someone want to get rid of the wires as they walk/jog along the street?
The ability to control the volume; pause, track forward and back step tracks is a big boon in the city, where you might not be inclined to whip out your music player while walking along a dark street.
The theory of that the Motorola S9 does is spot on, but we found some problems with the real-world application. It’s possible that that has been down to our particular headset.
Maybe the first generation headsets aren’t completely there yet, but that doesn’t mean they’re not going to get better.
We strongly suspect that you’ll be getting a set of stereo bluetooth headset in the future.
Scores
Audio quality – 84%
Design – 72%
Concept – 95%
Overall – 73%
you rated the audio quality 84% – but did you notice any lip-sync delay between sound and pictures when using this headset to watch videos on a Bluetooth enabled media player?