Purchased:

Price: 64 Euro
at: teltex Online Shop
on April 20th 2004

Pictures:

Have a look at the pictures I made from the headset.

General:

The Jabra BT250 looks very nice. The greyish color gives it an elegant look. When you touch it it feels like it is of a good quality. With a weight of only 23g it is also very light. The BT250 is the "bigger brother" of the BT200, which I had two weeks for testing. The only difference is the color (the BT200 is blue where the BT250 is grey) and the talking/standby times. The BT200 has 3 hours talk time compared to the 8 hours of the BT250. Standby time is 100 hours with the BT200 and 240 hours with the BT250.

Wearing comfort:

The wearing comfort is very good with the BT250. I can wear it for hours without pain. A so-called minigel is put on the end of the headset and fits smoothly into the ear. Minigels are available in many different sizes and shapes. For me the standard type is fine. To switch between using for the left or right ear you simply rotate the minegel by 180 degrees. After practising a little I was able to put the headset on with the use of only one hand.

Operation:

The BT250 has 3 buttons and one blue LED on it. The buttons are: volume up, volume down and the multi-funtcion button (MFB).
If the headset is off, you have to press the MFB for 3 seconds to turn it on. The headset indicates that is was turned on by flashing the blue LED five times very fast and then continues to flash about once a second to indeicate that it is still on.
If the headset is off and you press the MFB for 5 seconds or longer you enable the pairing mode. This is indecated by a constant glowing blue LED. In this mode the headset is visible for other bluetooth devices and accepting pairing requests.
To turn the headset off you have to press the MFB for more than 3 seconds. The LED flashes again 5 times very fast to show that is switching off now. If the headset is on you can press the MFB for less than 3 seconds to establish a connection to the device it was connected to the last time.

Tricky when using multiple devices:

The last thing is little bit tricky. This situation comes up if you pair the headset with more than one device. I have paired mine with my mobile phone and with my two computers. By pressing the MFB shortly the headset only searches for the last device it communicated with. If you used the headset the last time with your PC and are sitting now in your car and want to establish a call with the headset and your mobile phone your headset will only search for your computer and not for your mobile phone. In this case you can not trigger the voice dialing of your mobile phone by pressing the MFB on your headset. There are two things your can do. You can iniate the call with the keyboard of your mobile phone. If the call is established your mobile phone can transfer it to the headset. Alternatively you can quickly repeat the pairing of the mobile phone and the headset. To make it clear: your headset will still ring and receive calls and this only happens if you used the headset the last time with a diffent device than your mobile phone. Moreover my guess is that this is a typical behaviour for all Bluetooth headsets. Since the search for one specific device can take quite a long time the device only does a search for the last device it communicated with.

Using the BT250 with a mobile phone:

I mainly use the headset for using my mobile phone while driving. The voice qualitiy is nearly the same as using the mobile phone directly. The distance between phone and headset can be up to 10 meters with a nonblocked line of sight. But after maybe 5 meters your hear a cracking sound. At a distance of 10 meters or with obstacles in the way the sound quality gets very bad.
If you put the mobile phone in a pocket of your jeans, you should wear the headset on the same side. Otherwise you will hear some cracking sounds and the sound quality is not perfect. The human body blocks the weak Bluetooth signal very strongly.

Using the headset on a bike:

To use the right side for the headset is even more important if you use the headset while you are biking, because there are usually no walls around you to reflect the signal from phone to the headset. Using the headset while biking is tricky anyway, because of the strong wind while you are riding. Voice-dialing becomes nearly impossible until you stop or go really slow. Using the headset for voice-chatting is very nice and comfortable.

Using the headset with a Windows XP PC:

My first try was to use the headset with the Bluetooth basestation of my Logitech MX900 Bluetooth mouse. Using the base with my mobile phone works great, but I couldn't get it to work with the headset. Pairing went fine, but it was impossible to establish a connection. So I went back to my old USB Bluetooth stick and degraded the Logitech base to a pure charging station.
I mainly use the headset for voice-chatting with Skype.

Using the headset with a Mac (Mac OS X):

Using the BT250 with a Mac is very nice. It is very useful for using it as a headset for iChat. Pairing is quick and easy.
You can either change the audio input and output device in the system preferences "Sound" pane, where the settings are valid for the entire system thus all sounds are played and recorded throught the headset. Or you can use the iChat preferences and enable the headset only for the use with iChat. Using iChat with a (Bluetooth) headset results in a much better sound quality, since the headset prevents all echos.
When you have switched the system sound output to the headset and remove the headset or turn it off the Mac doesn't switch back to the internal speaker automatically. You have to switch back manually. If you do this, the Mac plays all the sounds that occured while the headset was not reachable. It remembers all sounds played during that time. It always sounds very funny when I switch back to the internal speakers, after the headset was away for a while. All the sounds from Apple Mail and iChat are played nearly simultaneously.

talk time and standby tests:

I am using the headset now for about three weeks. I am using the it about 10 to 20 minutes every day and I am turning it off at night. Using the headset this way I have to recharge it after about 7 days. But this were the first 3 recharging cycles of the headset and the performance may get a little bit better after the internal battery is "trained".
I assume that the battery is "trained" after 3 full recharging cycles now. So I tested the talk time.

Test setup:

distance: 1 meter (nonblocked)

device: Macintosh PowerBook G4

temperature: 22 degree celcius

mode: permanent full-duplex, by putting the headset in front of a speaker tuned to loud music and recording the sound on the computer

volume setting: headset set to medium loudness

Total talk time 7 hours 22 minutes

The tests shows that the talking time of 8 hours is very realistic. The test was done using permanent full duplex, what is not realistic for phone conversations. Usually only one person talks at a time. The headset maybe can save a little bit battery under real world circumstances and run a little bit longer.

audio quality tests:

To give you an impression of the overall audio quality I did some recordings with the headset and my PowerBook G4. I used the headset inside our house with different distances and under different conditions.
Listen to the MP3-files for yourself to get an impression of the sound-quality:

Test #	Distance	Obstacles	MP3-File
1	1 meter	none	1m nonblocked
2	5 meters	none	5m nonblocked
3	5 meters	one concrete wall	5m one wall
4	8 meters	one concrete wall	8m one wall
5	10 meters	none	10m nonblocked
6	1 meter	none	music

Conclusion:

The Jabra BT250 is a very nice and good headset. The wearing comfort is very high and you can wear the headset for hours without pain.
The talk time is very long and you have to recharge it about only once a week. The maximum distance between the headset and the other device is 10 meters, when there are no obstacles between the two. This is very fine for the typical use with a mobile phone or with a computer. The sound quality is very good for voice, but a little bit too dull for music, since it is only 8KHz and mono.
I can recommend the headset to everyone, who is looking for a good Bluetooth headset.