Bluetooth Headset and Headphones

By Vince

I have always been on the lookout for a nice Bluetooth headset, and a new contender is the LG HBS-730. It is one of the newer style devices that sits on your neck and has ear-buds with wires. It allows you to make phone calls, and is mainly a set of wireless headphones. This means you can listen to music or podcasts all day, and make phone calls with it. So far I have been very impressed, the sound quality is great and phone calls sound just fine (I don’t make all that many these days but the ones I do are great).

Check it out here (affiliate link): LG HBS-730 Bluetooth Headset

I haven’t killed the battery yet, it lets you know each time you turn it on how the battery is doing (high, medium, etc). Its supposed to last 10 hours of on time and 500 of standby which is very nice. I always turn the switch to off so it should last much longer.

A nice side benefit is you can add two devices, so your laptop and cell phone if you make Skype calls and want to listen to your laptop music. This also prevents windows sounds from going outside of your ear if you are in a co-work or office environment.

It seems to switch between the sounds pretty erratically, so don’t plan on listening to sounds on two different devices at the same time. If a call comes in, pause what your doing on the laptop and there shouldn’t be an issue.

I have taken is hiking for a couple hours and it works great, a couple hiccups here and there which might be attributed to interference from other bluetooth people but its not very noticeable.

Overall very happy with it and will continue to be my main headset for in and out of the office.

Some gotchas:

  • When you set it up on a PC, you need access to windows update to install the (stereo audio) drivers. I have not been able to find these online separately, so if your laptop is being blocked for some reason (big bro in the sky) then you won’t be able to get bluetooth to work.
  • I also needed to update the bluetooth drivers to support 4.0 protocols, you can do a search based on your chipset or laptop model and you should find them. Lenovo has one for certain thinkpad models, and broadcom has one for all of their chipsets. I bought a USB one online, a soundbot 340, and was able to find the latest drivers on their site.