Microphone quality: A great Bluetooth headset should transmit audio that’s crisp and easy to understand regardless of the environment where you take your call.And because everyone has different ears (as the wall of ears at Plantronics’s industrial-design labs illustrates), we look for headsets that come with multiple sizes of tips and loops, as well as other accessories for getting the right fit.
If you’ll be wearing this thing for long phone calls, or for extended stretches in the car or at the office in case you need to take a call, it should be comfortable enough for you to forget you’re even wearing it. Comfort and fit: If your hands-free Bluetooth headset pinches or causes discomfort, you’re unlikely to use it, regardless of how good it sounds.How we pickedĪfter consulting reviews on sites like PCMag and, and customer reviews on Amazon, we established a list of characteristics we thought the best Bluetooth headsets should have. If other people complain that you sound like a robot during phone calls, or if you’re unable to trigger Siri or Google Assistant from your older headset, it may be time to upgrade.
So you can use the same set for several years without missing out on many new and exciting features or dramatically better performance.īut if you have an inexpensive headset that doesn’t perform as well as you’d like, or if you’re dissatisfied with its features, upgrading to one of our picks will get you better sound quality, improved noise cancelling and voice or gesture controls. Bluetooth-headset technology hasn’t changed much in the past few years: the latest generation of headsets we tested in 2018 offer only marginal improvements over previous models. If you already have a working Bluetooth headset, you probably don’t need a new one. And if you listen to a lot of music on that phone, with only the occasional call, you’re better off getting a good set of stereo Bluetooth headphones with a microphone – we have guides to full-size Bluetooth headphones and earbuds. If you don’t do much talking on your phone, you’re probably fine using the earbuds that came with it. Some offer the option of voice dialling and answering. They also have a design aimed at all-day comfort.
These headsets include mics with noise cancellation, so you sound better to the people on the other end of your calls, plus additional buttons for more-convenient call taking and call making that you won’t find on traditional earbuds or headphones.
If you spend a lot of time on calls and you want hands-free convenience along with better microphone quality, long-term comfort, and call-management functions than traditional earbuds or Bluetooth headphones offer – and you want to keep an ear free to stay aware of what’s going on around you on your commute or at the office – a mono Bluetooth headset can solve your problems. In our battery test, it offered almost seven hours of talk time, lasting over an hour longer than our top pick. It also gives you much better mic quality for calls than you’d get from stereo Bluetooth earbuds that cost a fair bit more. The Jabra Talk 2 isn’t nearly as comfortable as our top picks, and its incoming audio quality isn’t as good, but it’s acceptable on both counts if you want something cheaper.