Blue­trek: Blue­tooth Gear From Play­ful to Pro­fes­sion­al

When we first start­ed look­ing at Blue­tooth head­sets and speak­er­phones, there wasn’t a lot of va­ri­ety. Most gear looked and felt pret­ty sim­i­lar, of­fer­ing com­pet­i­tive au­dio qual­i­ty, and lit­tle to dif­fer­en­ti­ate them. But one of the first to re­al­ly stand out in the au­to­mo­tive speak­er­phone space was the Sur­face Sound Com­pact, a classy unit that of­fered best-in-class per­for­mance.

Much has changed since then- bet­ter mi­cro­phones and per­for­mance, bat­tery life, and aes­thet­ics. But the com­pa­ny be­hind that love­ly piece has pushed in­to new ar­eas, and we’ve got two of their lat­est prod­ucts on hand to test. One of them is a lit­tle goofy, while the oth­er is one of the lighter head­sets that we’ve seen.

We’ll start with the Blue­trek Speaky. This lit­tle guy of­fers a style that isn’t for ev­ery­one- avail­able in two col­ors, bright pink or black, he comes em­bla­zoned with a mes­sage in­stead of a lo­go. Meant to sit on your dash­board, we were pret­ty skep­ti­cal- he seemed like­ly to be prone to tip­ping, and the un­usu­al mi­cro­phone and speak­er place­ment made it seem like an odd de­sign. Set­up was easy, pair­ing to our iPhone re­quired no PIN, and then we hit the road. In­clud­ed in the pack­age are the usu­al ac­ces­sories- Speaky charges via your car’s built-in cigarette lighter, and comes with vel­cro stick­ers to help him stay in place. Both worked fine, as did the nifty mo­tion sen­sor that ac­ti­vates the unit au­to­mat­i­cal­ly and lets him fall asleep af­ter 5 min­utes of in­ac­tiv­i­ty. We loved that you could an­swer a call by press­ing on his bel­ly, and ad­just vol­ume us­ing his arm- they didn’t al­ways work per­fect­ly but were good enough.

Blue­tooth 3.0 sup­port is built-in, though we weren’t im­pressed by au­dio qual­i­ty (the speak­er was def­i­nite­ly a bit muf­fled, the mi­cro­phone de­cent but with lit­tle noise-can­celling and per­haps af­fect­ed neg­a­tive­ly by place­ment). Bat­tery life is de­cent, at six hours of talk time, but this is a hands free de­vice that you should choose or re­ject most­ly based on style. The price is de­cent, run­ning un­der $60, and Speaky is avail­able now on­line and in stores.

For those in need of a more pro­fes­sion­al, ev­ery­day so­lu­tion, Blue­trek’s Car­bon Blue­tooth head­set of­fers a great bal­ance of weight, bat­tery life, price, qual­i­ty, and style. We’ve seen tons of head­sets, of­fer­ing ev­ery­thing from Star Trek looks to re­al­ly sol­id per­for­mance in windy con­di­tions, but this one of­fers some­thing new. Of course, car­bon fiber is par­tial­ly a mar­ket­ing gim­mick- but it does look cool, and is su­per lightweight, both of which are put to good use here. A 2012 CES In­no­va­tions Award Win­ner, this mod­el is a sol­id con­tender. Weigh­ing on­ly 5.9 grams, the bat­tery life is nonethe­less de­cent at four or so hours, and it of­fers many of the usu­al Blue­tooth ex­tras, in­clud­ing Mul­ti­point (al­low­ing you to con­nect two de­vices si­mul­ta­ne­ous­ly), sim­pli­fied no-pin pair­ing, and voice alerts. Un­for­tu­nate­ly, there is no A2DP, but it’s a head­set and not a set of head­phones, so we don’t re­al­ly rec­om­mend us­ing the Car­bon for mu­sic lis­ten­ing. Voice qual­i­ty is im­pres­sive; folks on the oth­er end gave high marks to clar­i­ty and it out­per­formed many (but not all) oth­ers in noise can­cel­la­tion. Wind noise was worse than some oth­ers, though, so con­sid­er your like­ly con­di­tions be­fore pur­chas­ing. Al­so, we did no­tice some fuzz and muf­fling on our end dur­ing calls, re­gard­less of de­vice type con­nect­ed.

Com­fort, al­ways im­por­tant when you’re go­ing to be hav­ing some­thing sit in your ear for a long pe­ri­od of time, was pret­ty good. The light weight and de­cent bal­ance helped, as did the va­ri­ety of ear tip sizes in­clud­ed. And an over-the-ear hook is in­clud­ed as well. Over­all, the Car­bon was re­al­ly close to ex­cel­lent- there was a lot to like here, and at a price around half of that of some oth­ers, we like where Blue­trek is go­ing. With a dis­tinc­tive and at­trac­tive de­sign, it’s a deal at un­der $60, avail­able on­line now.

Should you want to know more about them, visit www.bluetrek.com