[8525, TyTN, MDA Vario II, JasJam Accessories] tricky911t:
No with and without the JET Extensions add on which incidentally only supports the Widcom BT so no good for Hermes as its a MS BT stack.

I've spent all day playing around with the various reg settings, and mp3 players and this is what I have found so far.

The DS 970 headphones emit a very high pitched whistle which you can notice most if you have the phone volume on low say 1st or 2nd notch, the volume on your audio player of choice on low and headphones on max., so logical thing to do is have the audio player on loud (but not so the music distorts) and the phone volume on loud with the headphones adjusted to suit although in periods of silence you can still hear the high pitched noise (could this a MS BT Stack problem?)

The Reg Settings, basically you can put any reg settings you like in your WM5 phone becuase like windows normally, if its not recognised windows will just ignore it, so I have been playing around with the various settings but in all instances I still get the odd drop out of noise.

Adjusting the BitPool to 80 gave me almost constant drop outs/stutters (however you want to describe them), I found 58 to be best quality which backs up what I read elsewhere, and obviously knocking the value down to 20 or 30 gave me crappy sound quality. To see the changes you only need to disable the BT in the comms manager you dont need to go through a soft reset.

I've tried the Min/MaxBitPool and Min/MaxSupportedBitPool (havent established which is the correct registry entry but have kept them both at the same value) and found Min for 14 and Max for 80 gave me same quality as the BitPool at 58. I suspect the Max figure of 80 is wishful thinking.

Didnt notice any difference with the SampleRate reg entry but changing UseJointStereo from 1 (default) to 0 did give me proper stereo at least it sounded better.

I even installed the Widcom BT (0.50) stack from the Axim site but couldnt get that to work as kept getting insufficient memory for driver or something like that.

Long and the short, I think if we have Widcomm BT on the Hermes we wouldnt have half the problems we are experiencing now like stutters/drop outs et al. Whether MS will address this problem in an update I dont know.

I'm gonna live with this for now becuase I dont like the ear bud headphones like those on Nokia or the HTC wired versions and I want something for the gym and I could get it to do voice tag dialling by pressing the mike but for my car I'm waiting for the MK6000 which should be out later this month provided I can get TT6 audio over a my car stereo when its playing a CD not a one or the other situ.

The best freebie Audio player I found so far was a freebie version of TCPMP (now CorePlayer) but I preferred the Pocket Player on a free 30day trial becuase I liked the UI better than the TCPMP even though it had slightly more features. At the end of the day most people are gonna want an equalizer and a good UI which Media Player doesnt give us.

Incidently even though the Pocket Player is supposed to support the AVRP stuff, becuase of the MS BT stack you wont get track names et al on to the 970 headphone display but as mentioned above thats all becuase of the MS implementation. MS are well known for implementing their stds even if established stds already exist.

I will wait to see what the HTC S100 is like when its released http://www.expansys.com/htc/p_htc_item.aspx?i=140285

I suspect HTC and MS will be working together to resolve the shortcomings of their stack namely the stutter or drop outs but if you look at the picture we can see straight away we wont be getting any message display from the device so perhaps MS wont be providing this facility any time in the near future.

If this is the case then our only options will be to get a Widcomm BT stack for the Hermes to give us proper AD2P but as the Hermes doesnt provide EDR on BT2 is this becuase of a hardware restriction or software restriction, if the latter could this be another MS BT restriction?

BTW if you live in the UK and bought your headphones or whatever over the phone or online you can use the Distance selling act to get a refund if the product doesnt meet your expectation amonst other things. This means in theory the supplier should not only refund you for the cost of the product, but also your shipping costs (both ways) and not charge any restocking fee.

So you dont have to be left out of pocket if the product hasnt lived up to expectation.

_If_ I get time over Xmas I might have a chance to look at whats involved in providing a Widcomm BT stack for the Hermes, but I have a whole heap of apps to knock out at the moment so it might be wishful thinking. Food for thought. :-)

Edit:

I've been out this morning walking into town and gave it a field test!!! Well this beast should be tied down, becuase if you so much as walk fast, jog or run then you will have it flying around in next to no time if its loose outside of your clothing. When walking it was flying around bouncing off each of my shoulders and when I ran a little it cam close to having my eyes out a couple of times not to mention hitting me on the face. I have adjusted the length of the cord so that it should fly around less but it didnt help too much. If you were to put it inside a t shirt for example when running then your sweat will get into the device most likely through the power socket at the back of it.

So all in all.... I'm gonna send it back becuase its not functional for me. At least HTC S100 comes with a clip to attach it to some item of clothing and the nokia well I cant comment but if its not got a clip of some sort to attach it to clothing with then I can see that suffering from the same problem as the DS970.

I can see myself going for the HTC wired headset where its modded by cutting off the ear buds and putting in a 3.5m socket for the headphones and make do with a std BT headset until the carkit I'm after is out.