SE Accessory - HBH-DS970 Bluetooth Headset

When I lost my earbud from my W660i earphones the other day, I scanned the internet to see if there were any replacements of the same colour. I noticed there wasn’t and I knew the earphones were limited edition/rare. Even a few versions of the Red Rose phone itself didn’t have the red earphones. I desperately searched eBay for W660i compatible earphones, and I got the same one but in white colour. As I was searching. I came up with this item:

Sony Ericsson HBH-DS970 Bluetooth headset

It appealed to me beacuse I’ve never tried bluetooth headsets at all in my life. I thought this was quite out-of-the-ordinary so I bought it off eBay. It looks like a mp3 player but it does not have any in-board memory. It uses the Bluetooth Stereo function from capable phones to stream and control the mp3 player. I guess it can act as a mp3 player, but you would need to take your phone with it where-ever you go. It would look pretty weird when you’re on the bus and start speaking aloud to your mum

The design of the headset is pretty hardcore. It has a smooth glossy finish. However it is pretty hard to use. I found the item to respond very slowly in terms of updating it’s screen. When you skip songs, the song still plays the first 3 seconds of the song before it switches. I know my phone is fully capable with this device (Sony Ericsson W660i) since they are from the same company, it’s a Walkman phone, and it features Bluetooth Stereo 2.0. So it has to do with the device itself. The earbuds are in-ear like all the Walkman phones. I reckon the quality is just about par with my NX1s. It uses the same charger as a Sony Ericsson phone.

Another thing I didn’t like about it was it’s power source. It has an internal battery that lasts for around 8 hours on full play and around 250 hours on standby, but you will need to charge it when it runs out. They should have a feature so that it runs on AAA batteries or something. That way you can always take the used battery out and place a new one in, and you’re good to go for another few hours. Because both the HBH-DS970 and the phone are reliant on each other, if you do want to get one of these, be warned that you have to remember to charge your phone/headset overnight. Or else you will end up finding the next morning that you can’t hear your mp3 player with the headset because it’s not charged.

The bluetooth headset uses Bluetooth 2.0 but is backwards compatible with Bluetooth 1.1

Here are some specifications (from Sony’s site):

Size 74 x 0 x 0 mm 2.9 x 0 x 0 inches
Weight 27 g (1 oz)
Range Up to 10 metres
Performance
Talk time: Up to 6 hours
Standby time: Up to 300 hours

Click above to check out the full picture - Sony Ericsson HBH-DS970