Gavin’s Gadgets :-

HP Bluetooth Stereo Headphones Review

 

Welcome to my next Gavin’s Gadget review.

 

The HP Bluetooth Headphones arrived in the post today and it felt like xmas come early.

 

I ripped the packaging open, to reveal the headphones, a European charger with an adapter to charge the 4700 and another for the headphones, spare headphone pads, installation and instruction CD, a bag to protect the headphones, Getting started booklet and various other bits of literature. Refer to picture.

 

 

The headphones are compatible with the H2210, H4150, H5550, rx3715 and hx4700 and are only available in black.

 

As the headphones include the  ability to charge the headphones and ipaq overseas as well as in the UK, this is in essence means you know have a European charger , which would normally cost circa £20 upwards.

 

The setup procedure is very simple. First, soft reset your ipaq. Connect it to your PC and make sure its connected. Insert CD. Follow instructions for loading bluetooth driver. Then you will be asked to soft reset your PDA.

 

Next charge the headphones. This should take up to 4 hours. An orange light on the headphones glows until battery is charged. The runtime of the headphones is circa 8 hours (that’s assuming your pda is not flat by then!).

 

 

To create an active connection between your PDA and headphones you first need to pair the two devices. To do this turn your ipaq bluetooth on. Go to the Bluetooth Manager and select new. Press and hold the centre button on the headphones for about 10 seconds until the light flashes blue and red. Your ipaq will ask for a passkey number. Enter 0000.  The final step is to turn on the headphones. Do this by pressing the middle select button.  Or tapping on the Bluetooth Headphone icon(in your active connection screen)  and then selecting connect.

 

This may sound complicated but in reality it takes less than 2 minutes if that.

 

The burning question you are asking is “are these any good”. In one answer “yes” but there are glitches with these headphones.

 

The sound quality is excellent. The pause, play , forward and previous track only work with Windows Media player. I was disappointed that the Ipaq Audio Equaliser doesn’t work , so with Windows Media player it was not possible to adjust the bass and treble settings. Obviously, this would not be a problem with a 3rd party music program. But note that the bass response is still very good.

 

I played games etc.. and the sound was very clear through the headphones.

 

So what are the glitches. Well whilst walking along I lost the odd beat, or split second. When stationary I had no loss of music. But the most annoying problem occurred when I walked past a Mini Cab office (Taxi) and the sound became all garbled. I had to disconnect and reconnect to restore sound again. This problem occurred again at a major London Ralilway Station. I noticed this problem again whilst walking in the City of London. I hope HP release a driver update but I think this is down to the limitations of Bluetooth.

 

Also, within the literature, it recommends closing down all other running applications before using the headphones and not to use Wi-Fi. I can see myself increasing my 4700 ram from 64mb to 128mb in the not to distant future.

 

In use , I was able to listen to music and read my news feeds via Newsbreak (www.iliumsoftware.com) . It is not possible to open an internet connection and use it properly. My 4700 ran out of puff.

 

On the cool factor, I showed my work colleagues the headphones and everybody just drooled. So its 20 out of 10!!

 

In summary, I love the HP Bluetooth Headphones. Even with the technical glitches.

 

Any feedback or questions to gavin (at) palm247 (dot) com