BlueSoleil

A2DP. Advanced Audio Distribution Profile. Or just wireless stereo. This will be big. It was mentioned here before, when I wrote about annoying headphone plugs incompatibility problem. And guess what... it has been solved. How? By getting rid of cables and plugs. Yes, cables are gone, forever.

Bluetooth has been with us for years. Most of us have been using a wireless headset with a mobile phone. But then we used to have a separate headphones for media player (like iPod) and another set for use with a PC (for Skype or Google Talk or another form of VoIP). Personally I hate carrying three devices serving the same purpose, and that is why I complained... Now it is time to throw all the previous sets away. Thanks to the Sony Ericsson HBH DS970 Bluetooth stereo headset.

DS970 has everything I wanted:

• It is a sound isolating in-ear design, perfect for noisy environments, without an extra bulk.
• The drivers deliver very good sound with rich bass (as always with Sony, I should say).
• The lanyard design is very comfortable to carry them all day long
• They can be used as an ordinary phone accessory for making calls. Microphone is very close to mouth for clear conversation (something rather rare with the latest trendy Bluetooth headsets that tend to be nice and small but result in a horrible call quality).
• Thanks to the A2DP/multipoint feature can be used for listening to stereo music. And there is more. When the phone rings, a quick glance at the display hanging from your neck reveals the name or number of your caller, and the music is paused for the duration of a call. And multipoint is really multipoint, meaning the DS970 can be paired with up to ten devices (computers, smartphones, media players...)
• A2DP is accompanied by AVRCP (another Bluetooth feature) used to control the source device. Put simply - there is a play/pause button on the DS970, together with forward/back buttons to control the player remotely.

Almost perfect device. The only thing Sony really blew is the charger. It is three times the size of the headset. Wouldn't it be more elegant to provide a thin USB charging cable?

So after pairing the DS970 with my phone and having several calls, I started looking for ways to "connect" them to some source of music. To do that the player (whatever you use, a smartphone, a notebook, an iPod...) must support A2DP Bluetooth. And among my truckload of gadgets, actually none did. A2DP profile was intended to be in the latest Windows Mobile AKU2 update, but due to poor performance of the Microsoft implementation, it was taken out by most of the Windows Smartphone manufacturers. Fortunately the necessary libraries can be found here or there and in a matter of minutes my smartphone was able to stream wireless stereo to my new headphones.

Then I turned to my notebook. An IBM T41. Neither standard Microsoft stack nor the IBM-supplied Widcomm (now Broadcom) supports the A2DP profile. So, as always in case like that, I turned to Google for help. It came out with a solution - BlueSoleil from IVT. After using variety of Bluetooth applications, I have to admit BlueSoleil is by far the best I have seen so far. Fully worth the 10 EUR price tag. It works flawlessly and is extremely intuitive, introducing a nice concept of the PC in the middle and all Bluetooth devices orbiting around it. So after spending a while with a trial version, I soon became an owner of the full version. Together with the DS970, it does everything I paid for. One universal headset, that is a snap to connect to either my phone or my notebook, plays stereo music (even controls the Windows Media Player), and pauses to handle calls coming from my phone (that by the way can stream its music too).

Looks like finally cables are going away and the only cable in future will be the one to supply power and recharge. That, thanks to USB (Universal Supply Bus), will be standardized as well...