Motorola HS850 Review

Overall Rating

It fits fine
The incoming sound is fine
Charges quickly

The mic is not very good at picking up your voice, and you have to shout

As with the Motorola H500 bluetooth headset that I have, the Motorola HS850 has a very bad outgoing voice transmission, and this is paired with a V3. Customers are always asking me what I said. I'm taking it back to the store, and I am going to try a different brand, and not the Jabra's. They are like ordering a burger through a clown's head and they have a really bad setup for charging. I had one go bad on the second charge. I haven't had a good bluetooth set yet that worked well with picking up my voice. They pick up other sounds, but not my voice. I find myself shouting. These are the worst devices ever invented for what they are charging for them, and they need a real, true sound engineer to come up with one that works well... like maybe a fold up mic that gets pretty close to your mouth would be nice. I've dealt in mics for a long time, and having one at your ear isn't going to pick up anything but other sounds in front of you. The human voice throws forward, not backward toward your ear. That may be the reason the sound transmits in a muffled quality. A good test for these devices is to call your answering machine and record what you sound like. You'll be appalled, especially if you make business calls on these things. I hate talking to people I can't hear well.

Members' Comments onEff Exx's Review

• m whalen on 6th Dec 2006

  I have had the Motorola HS850 bluetooth headset for more than a year - I wish I had returned it to Verizon where I bought it, during the return period. It is a very poorly engineered product. All that my clients could hear was the background noise - they could easily hear the voice coming from across the room, but not mine. I agree that a human voice is a sound that projects forward; sound needs a surface to vibrate back from - simply physics. Anyway, I realized that I was annoying more of my business contacts by using this thing, so I gave up on it. Nothing was more revealing on the issue than when I would receive calls from a friend who also had one; I couldn't find a polite way to tell her that the device was making me crazy; I was glad when she told me she accidentally dropped it in a glass of water and it wasn't working any more. . . . best place I could think for this thing.
  
  MA Whalen

• Eff Exx on 4th Jan 2007

  It's taken me a long time to find a Bluetooth ear piece that works well, but I finally did. This is the best one yet. It is the Plantronics Voyager 510. A friend of my brothers was at my brother's house for Xmas and was telling me about it because he had the same problem with these things until he got the 510. He saw one of his neighbors talking on one all the time and finally asked him if he liked it and what the brand was. The guy said he had no problem with it except the on/off button is a bit difficult. I've had one now for a couple of days and everyone hears me clearly, even over road noise. YES the on/off button IS a bit difficult but it works pretty good otherwise. RadioShack - $79.99 - out of all the devices out there this is the best for the money. The normal retail on this is about $100 elsewhere. Might be able to get it on one of these comparison sites for even less than I paid. Get one, try it and let me know. - Eff Exx