Motorola HT820 Bluetooth Stereo Headset Review

Connect the Headset to a Phone

Connection to our Motorola RAZR was effortless. After entering ?discovery? mode for both the headset and the phone, the pairing was quick and painless. After the two were paired, the phone?s system sounds could be heard through the stereo speakers. The headset was pretty comfortable initially. The medium sized speaker drivers are well padded but slightly heavy. It was an interesting sensation to hear all the phones clicks and beeps in stereo ? it certainly made the experience of using the phone a good one.

The volume and sound quality on phone calls was excellent. We could easily hear the party on the end of the line no matter what kind of noise was in the room or vehicle. Motorola doesn?t say that the imbedded microphone is a ?noise canceling? one, but when we tested the HT820 in a crowded and loud room our conversation could be easily heard by the party on the end. The HT820 didn?t totally remove the background noise, but it did a good enough job of filtering out noise to make conversation easy. We found that voice-dialing was accurate in a quiet environment.

As always, we tried to pair this headset with a Treo 650?no surprise here that it didn?t work well at all. (Will someone tell the folks at Treo to please fix their Bluetooth implementation!?! They have to be loosing business as people get more and more frustrated with the limited headset options out there.)

Incoming calls were registered on the Motorola HT820 almost instantaneously with a pleasant ring in the headphones. When dialing, phone calls were transferred very quickly to the headset ? many times even before the call started ringing. I was easily able to go 35 feet or so away from the headset when talking which makes the range of this Bluetooth set excellent and one of the best we have seen.

In general, connectivity and sound quality was excellent. The microphone is located in the right ear-piece. Motorola uses an upgraded DSP in their BlueCore3-Multimedia (BlueCore3-MM) chip to help reduce background noise and any echo that might adversely affect your phone conversation when wearing this set.

Lastly, we had some videos on our RAZR that we were able to hear very clearly and in stereo. It was incredibly cool being able to jam to Shakira and the Black Eyed Peas in full stereo on my phone (What? You don?t like ?Hips Don?t Lie???) . Having the ability to listen in stereo to these videos made me want to go and load up some mp3s for listening. So after I put on about 10 songs, I went to play them and?..nothing. Funny, the audio from the videos played though the HT820 with no problem, but the mp3s gave me no sound. When there was no headset, the mp3 sound was there.

After a bit of research, we found that for the phone to be able to play music via Bluetooth, the device must be equipped with Advanced Audio Distribution Profile (A2DP) and Audio Video Remote Control Profile (AVRCP). There are phones that exist with these two protocols built into them, but unfortunately for us in the States, the only phones that have these profiles are in Asia. Hopefully, we will see phones in the near future support this for there are many people who would love to have this feature.