A Tragic Death (of a BT Headset) and a Marvelous Discovery

I was out for a bike ride a few weeks ago in beautiful Marin County, north of San Francisco. As usual, I was wearing my bluetooth headset, a Jabra BT530, so if I got a call, I wouldn’t have to fumble around in my jersey’s back pocket and risk dropping the phone or, even worse, crashing. I was descending a hill and a bee decides to get caught in my helmet strap right by my left ear. Instinctively, I swatted it away, though not before getting stung.

A few miles later, I reached up to activate my voice command on my Jabra to let my wife know that I would be home soon. Guess what? It was gone. During my swatting, I inadvertently knocked the headset off my ear. Given that I was tired from my ride, I couldn’t get myself to turn around, climb the hill, and look for it. So I gave it up for lost.

But, after getting home, it seemed wasteful to get a new headset when my Jabra might just be sitting by the side of the road waiting for me to retrieve it (sort of like a lost dog). So, a few hours later, accompanied by my sharp-eyed, almost-seven-year-old daughter, I went on a search-and-rescue mission. One small problem was that I didn’t know exactly where it fell off. We drove up the hill slowly with both windows open scanning left and right, but no luck. So we turned around and repeated the process. And there it was, lying on the other side of the road!! I got out of my car and went to pick it up filled with excitement at having had a successful hunt…until I saw the Jabra close up. It had been run over by a car and no amount of surgery was going to bring it back to life. Yep, technological road kill.

This long-winded introduction brings me to the point of this post, namely, my new hunt to find a replacement for my recently deceased BT530. I’ve had my share of bluetooth headsets in my day and I have to say that none have ever worked very well. By now, I don’t trust what ads say about BT headsets. They’re comfortable in your ear? Not my experience. You can talk and hear in a tornado? No way, Jose. They pair easily with your phone? Maybe if you have a Ph.D. in computer science. And when I bought my Jabra about three years ago, even the most expensive units only rated 3.5 stars on amazon.

So when I began to research new headsets, I wasn’t very optimistic. But one kept coming up on the list of best BT headsets, the Blueant Q2. Cnet gave it an “excellent” 4-star rating. Amazingly, amazon had it crowd-rated similarly. It was also very attractive looking and it wasn’t only $50 (which is about what I think BT headsets are worth).

My newly ordered Q2 arrived last week and I have to say it lives up to its reputation. Great-looking matte black finish. Comfortable in my ear. Ear loop to keep it in place. Easy and quick pairing with my Samsung Galaxy S2. Coolly, you can download your contacts from your phone into it and it will announce by name when a contact calls you. A nice-sounding fellow is very helpful to me when I push the multi-function button. And it links easily with my Samsung Galaxy S2’s voice command so I can use it totally hands-free when I’m driving.  The only small knock I have against it is that fuzz collects in the metal screen that runs its length.

Bottom line: If you want a reasonably priced, sporty, and high-performing BT headset (and who wouldn’t), the Blueant Q2 is for you.

Just one question. What is a blueant (must be an Aussie thing)?