Bluetooth Stereo Headset Roundup

BlueAnt X5

Motorola HT820

My first experience with a set of A2DP Bluetooth stereo headphones was Motorola's HT820, which was included with the Motorola Q that we received back in May of this year. I was quite pleased with the experience overall, and was very happy about finally being able to lose those wires. But back then there were few devices available with A2DP support, so I had kinda just assumed that all A2DP headphones would work with all A2DP devices, just as pretty much all Bluetooth headsets work with all Bluetooth phones.

With that naive thought in mind, I decided last month that we should do a roundup of A2DP headphone here at MobileBurn. We matched up four pair of stereo headphones with four A2DP devices. The headphones in question were the BlueAnt X5, the Motorola HT820, Nokia's BH-601, and the Sony Ericsson HBH-DS970. Our test phones were the newly released LG Chocolate for Verizon (VX8500), a pre-production MOTOKRZR K1 from Motorola, Motorola's Q Windows Mobile 5.0 smartphone, and the Sony Ericsson W710i Walkman phone.

The results of our testing were quite depressing. No headset worked properly with all of the phones, and no phone worked properly with all of the headsets. Because of the nature of the testing, it is hard for us to determine whether the phone or headset is the cause of any particular problem, though a few issues seem consistent enough across the board that we can level blame.

Nokia BH-601

Sony Ericsson HBH-DS970

So without further ado, we begin with BlueAnt's X5.