[General Accessories] Menneisyys:
DEFINITIVE ROUNDUP of 3 st. BT headphones: Nokia HS-12W,Plantronics Pulsar 590 & 260

Unfortunately, except for Mobileburn’s excellent Bluetooth Stereo Headset Roundup , PDAMania’s two related articles (English summary here), Fire Dragan‘s roundup and some other HowardForums and XDA-Developers threads (see for example this and this), there are no real one-to-one feature & compatibility & quality comparisons between current Bluetooth stereo headphones.

This is why I’ve set out and made some SERIOUS tests with three current and popular Bluetooth stereo headphones: the Nokia HS-12W, the Plantronics Pulsar 590A/590E and the brand new Plantronics Pulsar 260.

Unlike with most other tests ever published on Bluetooth headphones, I’ve tested all these three headphones with a heap of (mostly my) A2DP-enabled gadgets to get a clear picture of their compatibility and sound quality with each of them.

Why compliance testing is useful, in the first place? As you may know, A2DP (that is, stereo Bluetooth sound transfer) is pretty new. As with several other areas of Bluetooth, A2DP is still suffering from its infant illnesses; particularly, major compatibility problems. This means stereo headphones that otherwise sound excellent with one (set of) sound source(s) won’t necessarily produce the same results with other devices.

The major incompatibility issues also result in a lot of contradicting reviews and user opinions about current A2DP-capable headphones. For example, when a user "only" has A2DP sound sources of one set but not of alternative ones, he/she may find a given, otherwise not fully compatible set of headsets just great or plain awful and useless - all depending on what sound sources he/she has tested the headphones against. For example, if a particular user uses his or her stereo headphones with the Widcomm Bluetooth stack (see below), he or she most probably will never run into compatibility problems and may even consider the given model excellent. On the other hand, if he or she happens to test against the Microsoft Bluetooth stack and he/she happens to have an incompatible headset, he or she will probably find the headphones plain useless. This, unfortunately, makes most reviews & user opinions pretty one-sided or even plain unreliable.

This is why thorough, multi audio-source tests are extremely important when you test Bluetooth A2DP headphones.

The most important area of these incompatibility issues is the vast quality difference between the currently two major Windows Mobile Bluetooth (BT for short) implementations (so-called “stacks” ) with some (not all!) stereo headphones models. For example, neither of the two currently available Plantronics headphones are able to play back anything coming from the Microsoft Bluetooth stack at a decent quality, unlike (some) other brands / models (for example, Nokia headphones) – if they are at all able to connect to these devices (for example, one - the 260 - of these models couldn’t even connect to two of my test Windows Mobile PDA’s). Additional compatibility issues like the built-in display not being compatible with, say, the caller name or the song title are just an icing on the cake.

This is why I’ve made sure I’ve tested these headphones with all the A2DP-enabled sound sources I could get hold of (there are MANY of them!): many Microsoft and Widcomm-based Windows Mobile devices and several non- Windows Mobile-based ones like Nokia's new, cheap (!) and pretty cool model 5300 XpressMusicor the even cooler and even flashier Samsung YP-T9J, in addition to major Palm OS-based models like the Tungsten 3 running Softick Audio Gateway, the great A2DP client for the Palm. That is, this test is not only written for Windows Mobile, but also for Palm users - or, for people just wanting to get a cheap (!) A2DP-capable music solution, let it be either based on the Nokia 5300 or on the Samsung YP-T9J, both being excellent choices for the price. As long as you use them with a fully compatible A2DP headphones, that is - as can clearly be seen, the Nokia 5300, A2DP-wise, is NOT really compatible with the two Pulsar headphones.

Many will ask after reading the previous paragraph “Hey! Did you try to fine-tune your Microsoft BT stack parameters to make the Plantronics headphones sound better?” My answer is YES, I’ve tried very hard to enhance sound quality and have published many articles on this question (see for example this one) and stay assured: in no way can you get flawless music playback quality on incompatible (for example, the two tested Plantronics-manufactured in this test and a lot of other models from other manufacturers) headphones.

In addition to A2DP (stereo sound transfer), I’ve tested them in “standard” phone headset mode too (that is, using them to conduct a phone call with a / the connected BT-enabled phone). I’ve paid special attention to checking whether the music playback is correctly resumed after terminating the call; whether the Call button is working as it’s supposed to; whether the volume and quality of the speech of both speakers’ are sufficient at the other side of the line and so on. I’ve also thoroughly tested the screen display compatibility of the Nokia headset, as far as its advanced features (caller name, music title, new SMS messages / unanswered calls / clock display). As can clearly be seen, these features are only compatible with genuine Nokia A2DP phones, NOT with Windows Mobile-based ones – or, for that matter, Palm OS / third-party sources like the highly recommended Samsung player. This, unfortunately, also applies to many? most? other Bluetooth stereo headphones with a built-in display – currently, I don’t know of any that really would work with all kinds of clients (most importantly, Widcomm- and Microsoft BT stack-based WM phones).

Note that this review isn’t a full review of / introduction to the three stereo headphones. The reader is kindly referred to the reviews in the “Notable reviews” row of the Comparison & Feature Chart. It’s there that you will, for example, see some nice shots of these devices. I just wanted to spend my meager time on some real-world, insightful, objective compatibility tests instead of wasting many hours on taking shots you can also see in other, already-existing reviews. Sorry for that, guys and gals - I think, given the lack of time I have, the information I provide here is MUCH more useful and, what is even more important, unique and genuine than just some flashy shots I would have wasted a lot of time on taking and, then, post processing.

The comparison chart

As with most of my other roundups, the vast majority of the information is in the Comparison & Feature Chart (CLICK THE LINK!). Make sure you open it in another browser window / tab, preferably maximized.

Explanation for the chart

Compliance report group: it’s here that I’ve listed the compliance reports of all the reviewed headphones.