Motorola S705 - The Best A2DP Yet?

Every now and then I have to post on wireless headphones. There are several reasons why the subject returns. I do travel a lot. And I want my gadget bag to be as small and light as possible. On the other hand I carry a lot of gadgets with me and the process to optimize the bag contents is a never ending story. One of the threads within this process is getting rid of power supplies. Notebook, Camera, Sony Playstation Portable, iPod, portable speakers, mobile phone... the battery life in each of these devices is too short to consider going for a week long trip without a charger. Fortunately this problem is almost solved by the USB (Universal Supply Bus :P) standard. Almost - but not fully solved, as most of the personal electronics manufacturers do not understand the device power plug should be mini USB, full stop. So still one charger but a number of cables. HTC, Motorola and Blackberry seem to be the only three who understand. The rest, Samsung included, still tries to reinvent the power plug...

The headphone problem is similar. It all comes down to the plug. In the old Sony Walkman days there used to be a standard here - a 3.5 mm stereo jack. You could buy just any phones, from any manufacturer, plug them in and they worked. But since the early days of mobile phones, for some reason I cannot understand, phone manufacturers started to implement their own headphone connectors. This had not been so much of a problem before music phones arrived. The tradition of incompatible plugs continued and users have been forced to listen to the music using the phones supplied by the phone manufacturer. The common quality standard here settled very low. The question one may ask is whether Samsung, Sony, Nokia are really interested in delivering music phones or is it just smoke and mirrors? Apple puts attention here - every iPod has 3.5mm jack. The others don't. As I have been changing my gadgets much more frequently than my headphones (I still love my Sony fontopia MDR-EX71 - they deliver very good sound, short cable and nice and small 3.5mm plug), I constantly look for a way to keep my headphones running regardless of an audio device I will ever have.

A2DP Stereo Bluetooth seems to be the way to go. Get yourself a good A2DP receiver and you can use your laptop, your mobile phone, your iPod (currently via an add-on, in future hopefully natively) to stream music to your ears. I have tried several solutions here. The first was a pair of Sony DS970, but unfortunately they were a bit weak on sound volume, had no 3.5mm jack and the USB charger required a separate "SonyEricsson" cable. Then I tried Plantronics Pulsar 260, but this proved to be a complete fiasco. Very weak sound and incompatible Bluetooth (did not even connect to my Samsung phone). So last week when the Motorola SoundPilot S705 arrived I was a bit skeptical. But so far I have to say, Motorola rocks. Very good and powerful sound, standard 3.5mm socket to plug your own preferred headphones, no compatibility problems at all and standard mini-USB charging socket. On top of that they throw a nice LCD display to help operate the thing and an RDS-capable FM radio built in. The drawbacks? May be it is a little too bulky, but on the other hand battery life is really very good. And it has the well known lag all new electronic gadgets share - the lag between the press of a button and actual action taken by the device. Other than that I am happy having a freedom to have one pair of headphines to use with my laptop, my phone (whatever this will be in future), my iPod, the Playstation and the like. Sometimes it takes really a few simple steps to make users happy. One hint here: stick to the established standards. It pays in the long run...

And a PS to Apple - I still cannot understand why your "Nano" does not have a built in microphone to be used as a Bluetooth "headset" for a mobile phone.