H500

The Motorola H500 is a small and sleek little Bluetooth 1.2 headset that requires just three small buttons to operate.

Weighing just 17 grams, the H500 isn't the smallest Bluetooth headset we've seen, but it is close. The visual appeal of the unit is somewhat reduced however, by the presence of a rather large and unsightly ear hook. At first we thought this hook was detachable, like on the Jabra JX10 so you could wear the H500 without it. However, unlike many other Bluetooth headsets, the H500 doesn't sit inside your ear or use an ear plug. Instead, it sits just outside your ear, with audio provided by a little speaker - meaning you must always have the ear hook fitted to the unit to wear it.

We were a little dubious about the sound quality this would provide, but were pleasantly surprised to find that it functioned quite well indoors. Outside was another matter, and on a road with high traffic, it did become a little difficult to hear and this is where an 'in the ear' headset might have made a little bit of difference. On the whole though, call quality was reasonable and the omni-directional microphone helped our callers hear us more clearly.

We soon discovered the reason the ear hook is detachable - so you can wear the H500 on either ear. Once you swap the headset to another ear however, you have essentially turned it upside down and the position of the volume buttons is reversed. Motorola has accounted for this and cleverly allowed users to customize the volume buttons as they see fit, so you can always make the topmost button increase the volume for example.

In addition to the volume buttons, the only other control the H500 has is a Call button. Pressing this button does just about everything from answering, rejecting, transferring or ending a call. We paired the H500 with our Nokia 6230. To pair the phone, all you have to do (you guessed it) is press and hold the Call button down. Once paired, we were able to both send and receive calls from the headset as well as make voice dials using voice tags stored in our phone. The only problem we had was placing our phone in Silent mode - the headset didn't notify us of the call. We found the range on the H500 to be a fairly standard 10 metres.

The only indicator light on the H500 is a blue light that flashes when pairing, in a call or in standby mode (the light can be turned off). The light doesn't flash when the battery is low though - a series of audio tones is used to communicate this. There are in fact 11 different types of audio tones, but no doubt you will get used to these as you use the device more often.

Motorola promise 8 hours talk time with this unit and 130 hours of standby time, which is above average.