Article / 15th Dec 2008

Good Hardware

It generally takes a lot to get me to really like a piece of hardware, thoroughly. For example, my experience of Fujitsu-Siemens' customer service was nothing but excellent, but the only reason I had so much contact with them was that my laptop's inverter went three times (to their credit, it's been fine for the past two years or so now, and my brother is still happily using it, but that laptop still sheds screws at the rate of around one a year).

However, a bit over a year ago, I decided to invest in some bluetooth headphones, and picked a pair of Jabra BT620s (warning: flash music thingy) semi-randomly from the field of available devices. A year later, and I can honestly say they're one of the better things I've bought this decade.

They're well-designed, and have good build quality; they also take and recieve phone calls, with pretty decent sound quality; they also turn into a USB Audio device (headphones and mic) when plugged in and turned on, a feature that is nearly impossible to find out about, and more importantly, last for absolutely ages. I've left these things on in my bag for over a week sometimes, and they'll still be happily flashing blue (they do that when switched on, but you can disable it, else you look a little weird) when I get them out.

I only wish the software support for A2DP was as good. Under Linux, it will work via ALSA, but PulseAudio still segfaults whenever you take it near them, Maemo has okay support, but often stutters slightly and the driver uses a lot of CPU, and Symbian is the only thing that seems to deal with them rather well (except for the occasional confusion when it decides it really should start playing the music over the tinny phone speakers at full volume, instead).

My only complaint is that they're a little large and heavy, but given that this seems to be needed for the batteries and speakers, it's fine, and I have big ears, anyway.

I also, in a strange way, enjoy having both earphones and an alarm clock with mini-USB ports and upgradable firmware; it's obviously the future. In a sick way, I can't wait for the day when I need to spend 30 minutes reflashing my shower so there's more than a millimetre between the "scalding hot" and "arctic cold" settings.