I received my Motorola HS850 Bluetooth Headset from Amazon.com yesterday and I’ve already used it during a 100-mile roundtrip from Newtown to West Chester, PA for a hockey officiating meeting. The sound quality was good on my end and the people I called thought I sounded good as well. This article focuses more on the process of getting the HS850 working for the first time.
I was glad I read the Motorola Bluetooth Wireless Headset Quick Start Guide. It’s an 8-page fan-folded document a little larger than a credit card that told me how to:
- charge the headset,
- pair the headset with my phone,
- turn the headset on or off.
The brief explanation of how to turn on Bluetooth on your mobile phone is Motorola-specific and meant to serve as an example in the event that you have a phone from another manufacturer. I have a Palm Treo 650 and it helped that I regularly use the Bluetooth feature of the Treo to sync it with my Blogging Workstation. I already had Bluetooth turned on and more or less knew how to search for the HS850 from my Treo and pair the two together.
Technorati Tags: Bluetooth, HS850, Treo 650
There’s also a similarly-sized 30-page MotoManual for the HS850 (90 pages when you count French and Spanish translations) that explains how to:
- pair the headset to additional devices (The HS850 can keep up to eight device profiles in memory simultaneously; It will attempt to pair to the last device it paired with unless you initiate the connection from another device rather than the headset.),
- control head volume,
- handle calls in different situations using the buttons on the HS850 (This includes a 3-way calling feature that may or may not be compatible with your mobile phone.),
- understand the meaning of light flashes and audio tones that occur during use.
My feeling about the HS850 documentation is that you need to read it if you want to get more than basic functionality out of the headset. I think the documentation is useful, but the booklets only present the basics. There are issues that are not covered in either booklet that will probably come up if you use the HS850 with both your PC and your mobile phone. I’m going to mention those issues here on Operation Gadget when I uncover them.