Jabra BT530 Bluetooth Headset

I have several headsets, and I've been using Bluetooth headsets since they were available.

This headset is surprisingly small and light. The design looks even better in "real life", and the build quality feels good and solid. It has a comfortable fit, and this is truly one of those headsets I could forget on my ear. A selection of ear gels are supplied with the headset. Receiving sound it good, with a quite full frequency range. Its microphones and noise removal really works. Tactile feedback is good, and there is no doubt when the keys has been pushed. The on/off slider prevents the device from being switched on by accident. Bluetooth range is as expected about 10m visible line.

On the downside, Jabra has introduced yet another non-standard USB plug with the exact same width as the normal mini-USB, but slightly thinner. You cannot use a standard charger, though a normal-to-proprietary cable is supplied in the package. The on/off button doesn't exactly slide easily, and activating one of the three buttons for volume up/down, answer/call is pressing the headset against your ear. The three buttons are easy to press, and given a little practice it is possible to hold the headset between thumb/middle finger while pressing the button with the index finger. The microphone is somewhat sensitive to wind, so this is preferably for in-door use, car use etc.

I bought this about 14 months ago. In this time the on off button fell off, lucky I found it and it was just pushed back on. Now the battery is not holding the charge like it did before. (talk time down to 1.5 hours)

Not long ago I lost my trusty LG HBM 235, which I had bought on a whim from Tescos. I decided that now I needed another BT headset I would do some research and find out what the best headset and how much I would have to pay for a decent, especially as I do a lot of driving in my profession. My research showed me that the best headsets with dual-microphones and such to properly noise-cancel were a costly £40 and up and I didn't want to pay that for a small device, which can very easily get lost again. My old LG had cost me just under £20 but I was prepared to pay a little more to get something that would be better.

The reason I went with this Jabra was that it had reasonable reviews for sound quality and came with an ear-hook, which is a must for me as I can't stand having anything intrusive in my ears. It cost a little more than my old LG, but it looked like it would be a step-up in quality. I had also thought that as Jabra had a large range of head-sets as that was their main job they might do a good job in comparison to jack-of-all-trades of electricals, LG.

When it arrived I was impressed with the packaging as it came with everything you would expect, device, charger and instruction manual, but it came with loads of spare ear buds and a spare ear hook. What disappointed me about the ear hook was that it was a fixed position with only one hole to insert it into which didn't move. Fortunately, the position it gave did not cause me any discomfort but my old LG had a cheap flimsy clip-on ear hook that you could move in any position you fancied. The device was suitably light, which was important so that it was comfortable to wear for long periods of time over the ear. My biggest problem though was with the ear-bud cover for the ear-phone. It had an intrusive shape designed so it would go right into your ear to deliver noise while reducing the chance of background noise getting into your ear. My problem with the bud was that it wouldn't stay in my ear so the ear-piece would become loose and wobble against my ear meaning I had to hold it in place, while making a call, not very "hands-free". In terms of functionality the device had a number of buttons and switches. The answer button was a silver button in the middle near the top of the device and was very simple to use. To each side of that where two huge volume buttons, one to increase and one to decrease. I found these buttons very annoying and not very useful. They were annoying because they were so big that it's impossible to push the device onto my ear without pressing one of them and because they were side-to-side rather than one on top of the other it took me a while to work out which did what without having to take the headset off and do it by looking. It would have been useful if Jabra would have a rising and falling tone coming through the earpiece while changing volume to work out which way the volume was going, but it just gave a single tone every time the button was pressed meaning I had to wait until the tone was noticeably quieter or louder. The on/off button was a slide switch situated on the side of the device. It was quite small and very stiff and it was almost impossible to operate when it was on my ear. Again comparing it to my old LG, which had a large multi-function button that answered calls and switched the device on and off, the LG would inform me what was happening by announcing when the device was switched off or on and when it had connected or disconnected, but the Jabra was silent apart from when I got a call, so if it disconnected by some strange reason I would not know until I heard my phone ringing but the ear-piece staying silent.

I had already decided that it was on it's way back to the seller when the damn thing wouldn't stay in my ear, but even on sound quality I probably would have sent it back. Despite being nearly £10 more than the LG HBM 235 the sound quality was much worse. In every call I took the ear-phone was crackly making people difficult to hear, especially if they were calling me from a noisy environment, and when talking to my girlfriend she said that I was much quieter on the Jabra and in fact she used to prefer me calling her using the LG rather than the Galaxy S2's native microphone. So with the fact that the hardware made it bad to use and poor sound quality I sent it back and decided to go to Tesco again and buy another trusty LG HBM 235, which might not be the flashiest headset but it is very comfortable, has good sound quality and is very easy to use and very informative and to what state it's in.