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Review of Bluetooth-headset Motorola H670

Sales package:

Headset
Charger
User Guide

Recently Motorola hasn’t been delivering much joy to the fans wireless headsets, preferring stereo solutions instead. Early in March we reviewed its latest and greatest Motorola S705, the S9 will be next but for now we are going to speak about the H670. It is a fashionable offering with some specialties and a pair of amenities inside.

Design

Recognizing a Motorola-branded headset among others has never been a big deal – glittering colors on the shelves and fresh trims always attract attention. This headset is no exception, our unit came in grey, to be more precise, it was light-silver. But at certain angles it appears to be light-violet. I don’t like such flashy color schemes, but girls, teenagers and metrosexuals will fancy it, and, of course, in the light of the already-on-the-threshold summer many people will want to refresh their gadget array by throwing off dark colors onto the shelves of various markets for peanuts. Or perhaps they won’t – it is up to you after all. The fact of the matter is that Motorola H670 colors are tastefully selected enabling you to choose a headset that would match not only a Motorola-branded handset, but devices by other manufacturers as well, and this certainly has much to do with phones for women. By the way, about the latter: when asked, five women told us without much dissent that this gadget looked cool. Though, it is a bit bulky. But instead it has an appaling color and novel mirror covering in addition to it. The headset’s back plate resembles the seamy side of all other company’s headsets, with grey uncolored plastic used.

Build quality is fine, the same is with coating, when carried in a pocket or handbag, the headset is more likely to keep the paint on. There are no unnecessary gaps, everything is rather tight.

Way of wearing

You are free to wear the device both on left and right ear, to change the position you should just take off reset the ear loop. The headset sets on the ear not firmly enough, if you shake your head, the headset starts jerking and lends you a feeling that it is about to fall down. I don’t recommend you to buy this headset for sport. As the mounting is not very solid, it doesn’t bring any discomfort, moreover the ear loop and the speaker’s podium are finished inside with soft rubber.

Controls

The controls here are implemented in a somewhat original way – basically, this is where some trademark features get unveiled. On the edges you will find volume buttons, “+” is always on top; the ball in the casing is responsible for swapping the keys back and forth - shake the device to hear it roll inside. The multifunctional key is of some interest as you should move it forward in order to turn the device on, while moving back cuts off power. By pressing it you answer a call, hand up, activate voice dial and redial the last number. All keys are bulky, responsive and easily-pressed.

The light indicator is placed on the front plate, it is quite tiny can not be disabled. Depending on what you are doing with the device it flashes with either red or blue.

Battery life

Battery life is quoted at 8 hours for talk time and about 8 days in standby time. The figures claimed are not bad, common test with non-stop music playback in mono-mode led to tidy results – 6 hours with only about 30 minutes of calls made. I suppose that headset will readily put up 4 days at average load.

As for the jack, standard MiniUSB is used, it works with not only original devices but chargers from PPC, communicators and etc. We didn’t manage to make headset charge from the notebook’s USB port but in theory such capability was available.

Connectivity and sound quality

The headset was tested in pair with Sony Ericsson W880i, what follows шы unrestrained praise. In the sense of voice transfer quality the device made me start jumping happily around - I had’t heard anything like that for a long time. Voices of people on the other end are crystal clear; your words are transferred without any distortions as well, since there is no DSP, environment noises are also heard quite well. But for Motorola-branded headsets voice transfer quality is fantastic, in other devices it is much worse. And what is more I can bring up only a few examples of such outstanding voice transfer quality in headsets, perhaps, these would be the select products of an altogether different class, such as Jabra JX-10, for example. The volume level is quite sufficient, on incoming call you hear the headset’s own tune, if silent mode is disabled the phone plays back its tune for calls as well.

During our quality time with the H670, we experienced no connection breakups, thanks to the 2.0 profile with EDR, the headset’s connectivity prowess is what you can rely on. Effective range at home is about 3-4 meters away from the handset.

Conclusion

Let us look at device pros and cons and figure out who would buy it:

Pros:

- splendid sound quality
- good youth design
- long-lasting battery
- fine build quality and good coating
- comfortable controls

One conditional letdown:

- target audience is limited to women and metrosexuals, even finished in a darker color the glittering surface will put most men off.

Incidentally, apart from gray, dark-blue variation is also available, to be more precise the color matches that of Motorola KRZR K1. Motorola H670 has already arrived in the market at the price of 70 USD, which is not cheap, I can say. Perhaps it would have been better to offer less wallet-bashing 50-60 USD or include in the sales package some additional options, such as case, charger for USB, soft cloth for rubbing the front fascia (which, naturally loses its best looks because of fingerprints). Nevertheless for all women I would give it a “recommend buy” rating, and, frankly, for all men as well – tastes, and especially when it comes to colors, do differ.