Windows Phone Thoughts: A Fresh Catch: Bluetake's BT400 G5 Bluetooth Headset on the Platter

Performance
In this section of the review, I focus on three major factors associated with overall headset performance: battery life, operating range, and audio quality.

The BT400 G5's battery only offers five hours worth of talking time (with 250 hours worth of standby time). This falls short of the typical seven to eight hours that a lot of Jabra's and Logitech's Bluetooth headsets offer. If you're a frequent hands-free talker, you can expect to charge this headset a few times a week. A shortcoming? Yes. Enough to drive you insane? No.

As a Class 2 headset, the BT400 G5 has an approximate range of ten metres. Overall, I found it performed better over distance and through walls than my Logitech Mobile Freedom. In a straight hallway bordered by brick walls, I was able to sneak in 15 to 16 decently-sized steps before the headset started to 'crackle'.

With a Bluetooth 1.2 specification, the headset sports some positive changes to interference reduction and voice quality. As mentioned earlier in the review, the headset doesn't pride itself on any sort of noise-cancelling technology, yet I still noticed that it worked fine in multiple environments. In a silent setting, the people I spoke to over the phone found the audio quality of the BT400 G5 to be better than that of the Mobile Freedom, which is interesting, because the latter features WindStop technology. When I tested the BT400 G5 in a pub (read: loud background music), the person on the receiving end found that my voice was still louder than the music (and no, I wasn't shouting). Finally, the old road and wind test (read: in car with window down) yielded a similar result.


Figure 10: The BT400 G5 with my E-TEN M600.