If you’ve read my previous blog post about wideband audio (and yeah, I know, I haven’t finished the series of posts about that, I’ll get around to it honest!) you’ll know I have an obsession with wideband telephony. So when a Jabra reseller offered to give a few of us at work some wireless headsets to try out I was keen as!
First impressions
The M5390 is a very elegant headset. It is lightweight and has a feel of a good build quality about it. It has a combined answer/power/control button and a combo up/down/mute button. It’s a lot longer than your “usual” Bluetooth headset, with the mic extending right down to an inch or so away from your mouth. You would look like a bit of a dick wearing it on the subway but it’s absolutely perfect in the office environment.
It comes with two ways to attach it to your head. You can attach it over your ear, which I’ve done for about 2 hours and found it to be mildly irritating, although this is not unusual for me. The other method is using an over-the-head metal band with ear cushion which is comfortable and probably the method I would use if I were to use the headset all day long.
The M5390 is a “dual Bluetooth” headset which is capable of connecting via Bluetooth to your mobile and a softphone at the same time. It comes in two flavours, one with a just a travel charger and the A335w USB Bluetooth dongle, or with the dongle plus a base station/charger that plugs into your desk phone and lets you switch between them.
I’m not ungrateful, but they only sent us the USB pack, which means my colleagues and I need to use our softphones in order to take advantage of these headsets. (To not include the desk phone base station is a poor decision in my opinion when you consider I work for Cisco which now holds the lions’ share of the enterprise IP telephony market).
While I can’t fault IP Communicator in particular, it shares a common trait with all softphones including Skype and Microsoft Office Communicator: it runs on Windows, meaning it relies on all the cumbersome idiosyncracies that Windows has to offer and is about 10,000 times more likely than a deskphone to crash as a result (but I digress, softphones have advantages too – lower costs, a travelling phone).
The multi-use version with the base station has been heavily criticized recently because it doesn’t come with a handset lifter for the phone. This means that the answer/hangup button on the headset doesn’t actually perform the task it’s supposed to do when used with the deskphone. My major gripe is that the base station, from reports, doesn’t appear to support wideband. Only the USB dongle, despite many deskphones these days supporting it.
Software
At least there’s the PC Suite. The headset comes with a piece of software which, when installed on your Windows machine, lets you manage the headset and determine what softphone the headset buttons control via a DLL hook into that software. The nice thing about this is that you can answer and hang up calls on the softphone with the button on the headset and not have to rely on interacting with the softphone UI itself. PC Suite also lets you toggle streaming of audio from the PC, so you could listen to music in iTunes too for instance (in glorious monaural)
Well, that’s’ the theory and it’s all well and good – once you’ve familiarized yourself with the intricacies of using a Bluetooth headset for your standard desk job that is. Now, I’m familiar with PABXs, VOIP systems, Bluetooth, softphones and Unified Communications…and I had problems feeling comfortable about using the headset as my primary method of voice communications throughout the day. Trying to memorise the meaning of random sequences of coloured lights, varying behaviour everytime the headset was turned on or the dongle inserted, and the PC Suite software even crashing a couple of times was awkward. I attempted to download and run the Firmware updater for the A335w on multiple machines and got an “ERROR” everytime I ran the executable. Nice touch, and their support site is pretty non-existant too.
Off on a tangent: It’s a shame, but Windows-based Unified Communications hardware is in its infancy in my opinion, and I can’t see user adoption being an easy process when using Bluetooth and/or the Windows sound device controls as they are today. Lets’ face it, the average layman is used to a normal, everyday phone sitting on their desk and at most a wired headset hanging off the side of it; with travelling notebook users being the prime target of the M5390 (it’s bundled with only a USB travel charger) nobody is going to have it ALWAYS connected, so if their softphone starts on Windows startup they can probably kiss their audio settings goodbye!
Back on track. You’re also SOL if you’re on a Mac. Thankfully OSX reecognises the USB dongle as an audio device but you’re on your own to select it as an input/output device in softphones, and there is no OSX software I know of that recognizes the buttons on the headset and lets you take advantage of them.
Sound Quality
So on to the wideband support. The A335w / M5390 combo is listed as having 6.8Khz of bandwidth which is okay but just a tad under G.722’s 7khz spectrum. The interesting thing is that the two devices speak Bluetooth to each other, not DECT or some proprietary system. I can’t tell what codec it uses in hardware, but here is a short recording taken from the M5390 and recorded on a Windows machine with Audacity. It sounds compressed and probably is.
The next one is recorded straight over the PSTN, so, G.711.
And finally heres what the headset sounds like paired to my iPhone and recorded via the PSTN.
Out of interest, I took a cheap Jabra Bluetooth headset that I usually use on my mobile phone and was astonished to find it supported a frequency range far greater than the PSTN – not quite as good as the M5390 but wow!
Conclusion
If you’re looking for a nice wideband headset for some kind of Unified Communications app, or Counterpath Eyebeam, or whatever, you probably can’t go past this baby. In my opinion it’s pretty limited without the multi-use deskphone adapter, and by its nature it can be complex to use. However it has great sound quality and is pretty comfortable to wear!
Will I use it? Probably not, since I already have a Plantronics headset for the PSTN, a teeny tiny Bluetooth headset for my mobile phone, and a wired USB headset for VOIP, but it might come in handy time to time!
