Still As Life

Ah Christmas, this year, I received one of these Tattoo Bluetooth Headsets by Bluetrek because my parents always seem to call me when I'm driving, so they decided this would be a great idea.

It has been quite the mission though. I spent all day yesterday trying to get it to work. Once it had completed it's first full charge and I began attempting to set it up on my phone, I was unable to get it to work. My phone, a Panasonic x700 would pair with the headset with no problems, and the controls on the headset would work with the phone, but it would not send audio to, or receive audio from the headset.

Since this was being problematic, I paired it with my MacBook Pro and it worked perfectly fine!

So I spent the rest of the day fiddling with my phone settings and trying to get it to rout the audio correctly, but for some reason the battery finally died, far sooner than it should have. According to the box and manual, the Bluetrek Tattoo Headset has a 4 day standby life or 4.5hr talk time. It died after about 6 hours, mostly in standby.

After this I was unable to get it to charge again, the charge light would come on when it was plugged in, but it would only stay on for a few minutes, and as soon as I took it off the charger it would refuse to turn on.

So today, we took it back to the store and they replaced it with another thankfully. This new one would pair off with my laptop fine, but it still had the same problem with the phone. I tried it with mums phone though and it worked perfectly, which leads me to believe that for whatever reason, my phone does not fully support it. So if anyone else has had this experience with the Panasonic x700 that can offer some advice, that would be great. In the meantime though, I'm looking at a new phone anyway, have been for a while, so perhaps it will just have to come sooner than I had been planning. Good enough excuse for me.

The headset is a great little thing though. I can't stand some of the big bulky ones that are floating around. The Bluetrek Tattoo is tiny though and while it comes with hook type things to put around your ear, they are optional, and it is small enough, that it will stay in my ear on its own without needing the hooks. This is great cause it makes it much easier to cart it around with me than those big things. It is only 8.1g, so its tiny!

For anyone thats interested in these types of things, it also comes with 8 different "skins" so you can chance the look of it, hence the name "tattoo", but they are nothing overly special in my opinion. I'm quite happy with the standard black casing.

The ear piece is very comfortable to wear and has 3 different sizings that come with it, so it will fit most people with no hassles.

The audio is a little bit dodgy at times, if you move it around in your ear it fuzzes, but it doesnt have any trouble if you are walking around and so on until you get around 10m from it. The fuzziness when you move it around isn't a very big deal though because once you've got it there it's comfortable enough that you don't need to move it around.

It has a pretty decent range, as I mentioned, it does around 10m, including through a couple of walls. Nothing special, but it's about average in my experience with Bluetooth devices and it is more than enough for it's purpose. 10m is also the distance stated on the box as being the operation range, so it stands true to that.

If you are like me and need something very small and easy to cart around, the Bluetrek Tattoo Bluetooth Headset is a great little device.

Labels: hardware, technology