Wednesday, May 2, 2007
Talking on the Wind -- the Helium Digital Bluetooth Communicator HDBT-110
Posted by Don Tolson in "HARDWARE" @ 08:00 AM
Introduction
Being a family man and very safety conscious, I've made use of a Bluetooth headset almost exclusively when I'm biking or driving around town. After a while though, it gets tiring and/or uncomfortable, and sometimes I want to include others in the conversation. So, I was quite intrigued with Helium Digital offered Pocket PC Thoughts the chance to review their HDBT-110 unit.
The unit comes packaged in the usual bubble plastic container, and includes almost everything you need to get started.
Figure 1: Contents of the Helium Communicator package.
Included are:
The Communicator unit itself is just under 4 inches in diameter, but I thought a comparison shot to a couple of PPCs would be helpful.
Figure 2: The Helium Communicator compared to an ETEN X500 (left) and a Dell Axim X50v (right).
I tested the Communicator on both my ETEN X500 Phone-enabled PPC, and on a Motorola RAZR v3. I also paired it with my Fujitsu T4210 laptop, just to see how well the audio worked. There was only one little glitch on the ETEN unit. The X500 uses Voice Commander by Cyberon as its voice dialer application, and the Communicator uses a push and hold on the Volume Down (-) key to activate voice dialing from the Communicator. Although there was no problem with initiation of Voice Dialing, I couldn't subsequently turn down the Communicator's volume without losing the connection, since Voice Commander saw any press of this button as a disconnect. On the RAZR though, this problem didn't exist, everything worked exactly as published.
