I use Plantronics headsets with my office phone and cell phone and I recently played around their BackBeat Fit and thought it was decent but, for me, I like to use headphones that surround your ears not fit in them. So it was with great interest I opened the box that arrived to day with their new BackBeat Pro headset.
Black vs. Colors
I know there is a real trend to put splashy colors on headphones but I’ve never bought into that. Problem is if you are flying on business or wearing pretty much anything that unless you have a selection of colors your safest bet is black, white, or gray because those colors go with everything. So I’m a fan of black and these are black.
Set Up
This is the first headset with NFC I’ve tested and I have to admit I’m a fan. I just turned the headset on, put blue tooth in scan mode, tapped the headphones to the phone and hit accept when the dialog box popped up and I was good to go for both telephone and voice. It actually took me longer to write this then it did to set up the headphones.
Controls
The controls on these headphones are both different and intuitive. That sounds like an oxymoron so let me explain. They a dial around the back of the headphone speaker to control volume which makes adjusting volume far faster than the buttons most smartphones use. They have a dual use mute button which is really interesting. When you are in a call it works just like mute would silencing the microphone when you don’t want the other side to hear the noise. But when you are listening to music it lowers the volume and feeds the microphone into the headphones so you can better hear someone who is talking to you. That is a pretty useful feature. Finally the stop pause button on one side and the answer phone button is on the other and both are huge so you can find them easily. I never even had to open the instructions and I was fine.
Sound
These headphones have decent lows and bright middles with good volume range if you start with your phone cranked up. The noise cancellation is good and this is one of the very few headphones that is both noise cancelling and wireless. The Microphone was better than I thought it would be because it isn’t in a boom but built into the headphones. There is an optional cable to physically hook the headphones to your device and it has a built in microphone which is better positioned. However for a set of headphones without a boom these are impressively good.
Fast Charging
These have a feature they share with my Nokia Lumia 930 they have fast charging. Not onle do the headphones with everything on have over 20 hours of battery life (which can double or triple if you turn either noise cancellation or the music off (like if you wanted to sleep on a plane) but you can get the headphones to 50% power in 30 minutes. That means if you can find a plug and have 30 minutes you can boost your headphones by at least 10 hours. I’m a huge fan of fast charging batteries because they can be life savers if you are running low between meetings or planes.
Wrapping Up: I Think I’m In Love
I seriously love these headphones, they are easy to use, are attractive, very easy to set up, have fast charging and long battery life, decent sound, and they both look and feel wonderful. I don’t think I could ask for anything more and while they aren’t cheap at $250 they actually are worth the money. Christmas is coming so you may want to consider these for your gift list.
