Motorola's H5 Miniblue Bluetooth headset

Well looky here, the extremely compact Motorola H5 Miniblue might finally eliminate the dork factor from those Bluetooth headsets -- ok, probably not. At only 33 x 41 milimeters and an incredibly light 7.4-grams it trounces the 10-gram Nextlink Bluespoon AX2 but still comes up short of knocking off the 5G as the "world's smallest." The Miniblue is equipped with an inner-ear speaker and mic which "picks up your voice through your ear canal." It ships with a recharging base which also doubles as protective shell when not in use. Talk time is a rather anemic 1.5 hours or confusingly, "up to 7.5 hours using the included portable charging base"...what the!? Expect these to drop sometime in the first half of 2006.

[jared @ Jan 4th 2006 10:12AM]

I think they mean you'll own it for 7.5 hours before you either step on it accidentally or it slides down into your brain.

[Jerusalem @ Jan 4th 2006 10:22AM]

the case/charger can (and should) hold it's own battry and change the darn thing even when not connected.

[JinKazama @ Jan 4th 2006 10:25AM]

Looks cool but I'm skeptical about "picks up your voice through your ear canal."...just doesn't seem like that would produce clear audio

[penk @ Jan 4th 2006 10:28AM]

if it's so tiny, why such a big picture?

[Joshua Stein @ Jan 4th 2006 10:29AM]

Excellent! Now we will have absolutly no way of telling if the guy yammering to himself in the car next to yours is talking on his phone, or just lost his marbles. This is going to lead to many incidents of people dropping quarters in the coffee cups of business executives sitting outside enjoying lunch.



And yet I desire one.

[Ed Zoutes @ Jan 4th 2006 10:33AM]

And all this time I was thinking that the Bluespoon 5G was the smallest, not the AX.

[Jason G @ Jan 4th 2006 10:35AM]

Josh, I'm sure it'll still blink blue bright enough to divert planes like all of the other Motorola headsets.



This must come with some attachable battery pack that is the "portable charging station." Either that or you carry around an extension cord...

[fnj @ Jan 4th 2006 10:48AM]

Somehow, I don't think this will help the issue of Bluetooth sound quality sucking? Let's take the already mediocre sound quality of the average cell phone call, combine it with Bluetooth, then add the need for you voice to travel through bones in your skull. Yeah, right!

[Nathan @ Jan 4th 2006 11:06AM]

this will just make it easier to look like your crazy by talking to yourself

[jared @ Jan 4th 2006 11:07AM]

To be fair, when we hear the sound of our own voice, we're predominantly hearing the waves transmitted through our wet/bony heads. So with this thing, you should end up sounding to the other person more like you sound to yourself, and less like the douche-you that normally gets recorded on other peeps answering machines.

[Thomas Ricker @ Jan 4th 2006 11:10AM]

Ed, you're right. Forgot about the 5G. That's the smallest...at �408/$489. I updated the post.

[Andrew Eller @ Jan 4th 2006 11:13AM]

Perhaps the portable base station houses a battery and every time you place the headset into it, it recharges. If so that is a clever idea.

[steve @ Jan 4th 2006 11:15AM]

price please!

[Jjeff @ Jan 4th 2006 11:28AM]

jared - some people will still sound retarded regardless of wether their voices are picked up free air or through bone conduction.



Jabras' claim to fame YEARS ago was the same thing only it was a miserable failure because it was so uncomfortable. They had ear canal shaped gel inserts that were supposed to fit comfortably but ended up just jabbing your ear in various spots. The sound it picked up was fantastic and no popping P's or ambient noise.

[floyd @ Jan 4th 2006 11:30AM]

Hmm. Someone might want to notice that it looks awful familar to a Star Trek ear piece for LT. Uhura.

[mroach @ Jan 4th 2006 12:09PM]

#14 - That is the first thing I thought of when I saw that.

[Zex_Suik @ Jan 4th 2006 12:26PM]

Think about it boneheads! Now you can actually talk normally or softer because of the bone conduction, no matter where you are. The person on the other end of the line will hear mostly just you and not the stereos, engines, tires, chatter of other people and the city around you.



I think they should issue these to the population to eliminate those yell-at-the-top-of-your-tar-infested-lungs phone calls that some people seem to have.

[Nami @ Jan 4th 2006 11:56PM]

Actually, voice travelling through ur ear canal is much clearer then vocals being picked up from the outside interference. Just as a side note to better understand this, the device will not be exactly picking up voice through ur vocal output, it will more likely pick it up from the vibrations the voice box causes in the inner ear. This is the same manner that a shark for example picks up sounds. They do so by picking up vibrations that travel through the water through their jaw, given that they don't have ears.

[jim @ Jan 16th 2006 1:56AM]

Either way this has been the funniest bunch of comments I have read in a while.



I bet it works halfway decent though.

[Kevin @ Jan 19th 2006 2:12PM]

As the owner of several generations of Jabra's, the comments above are wrong on two accounts.

First, the Jabras, while they didn't have a boom, did not pick up sound from the ear canal, they had a tiny microphone on the side that picked up ambient sound. It worked well, but was not the same technology.

Second, it was not a miserable failure, as evidenced by the fact that many of their models today use the EXACT same ear gels. They work great for me. Perhaps if you have badly misshapen ears!

[Gifford @ Feb 3rd 2006 7:28AM]

After watching the video presentation from CNET

http://reviews.cnet.com/Motorola_H5_Miniblue_Bluetooth_Headset/4505-1_7-31660605.html?autoplay=true,

I am pretty confident that there is a larger battery source in the portable charging station, that appears to have a eyelet at the opposite end where you will wear it around your neck. It will charge back up in 20min in the portable base.