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This will be the last in my current batch of stereo bluetooth headset reviews, the Nokia BH601. I’ve run out of headsets to review, unless of course one of the manufactuers wants to send me one to play with. Today I’d like to consider Nokia’s next iteration of the the series which previously gave us the flawed BH-501.

Fortunately Nokia have managed to fix nearly all of the BH-501′s flaws – the 601 is a substantially better product in almost every way. Unfortunately Nokia have introduced a range of new problems, which I am sure they will get round to fixing in a year or so.

The first major improvement is that it’s tougher. Nokia have eliminated both of the weak-spots in the bendy plastic adjacent to the earphones. The curves around the earphones of the BH-601 are sturdy bars of flexible plastic with shock-absorbing rubber inserts. They have the appearance of being able to withstand a great deal of twisting and bending. That’s good news because I have a feeling that I will get more than a few weeks use out of this device.

The next major improvement is obvious – they’ve added a few more buttons. Not quite as many as Jabra with their confusing  BT620s, but enough to allow some nifty new features. In addition to the original volume controls and select/power button we now have a track-skip controller.

Oddly enough the volume controls work in a different way to those on the BH-501. They do not seem to be linked into the phone’s volume control. The two act independently rather than (as with the BH-501) change a single volume setting.

Another neat feature is that for the first time Nokia have noticed that nobody likes to be lit up like fairy-lights. This device has two LEDs adjacent to the standard Nokia charging port. The blue light blinks to show that the headset is active and the green light blinks when the headset is on charge. There are no lights visible from the side or front. That’s good news for people who do not wish to be the focus of attention.

It never occurred to me to complain that the BH-501 could not operate while charging. It just seemed like too small a thing to mention, but that’s another thing that Nokia have changed. I’m not sure that I’d ever want to talk while charging as having a charging wire plugged into a headset somewhat negates the benefit of a wireless device. It’s nice they thought of it though, I can confirm that it works.

And now the bad points: The reception range of the BH-601 seems to be considerably worse than the BH-501 (which was excellent). In ideal circumstances the BH-601 will give me 10 metres of range from my Nokia 95 while listening to stereo audio. In an environment with moderate to low levels of radio interference (e.g. a normal city street) the signal will often break down unless I hold the N95 almost adjacent to the headset. I guess the thicker plastic used to make this device absorbs a lot more of the signals.

Speaking of range, a related issue is the device’s ability to recover from an interrupted signal. Unfortunately it’s not good. As I wandered around my office building today, I noticed that somebody operating a photocopier nearby was enough to interrupt the signal. Also the motor which opens the steel gate of the cycle-park put out enough EMF to completely cut the connection.

While a brief interruption may be acceptable in the face of interference, the problem with this device is that once it looses a connection the the link stays lost. The only way to re-connect is to power-down the headset, and then re-boot it. The phone appears not to have detected the fact that the link has failed resulting in complete silence.
Another oddity is that this stereo headset seems to switch to monaural mode every time a call comes in. A phone call is always in mono but one of the advantages of having a headset with 2 earphones is that you can hear the mono audio with two ears at once. When you use the BT-601 to talk on the phone only the left can produces sound. The right can (which includes the microphone) remains silent.

It’s also worth noting that the look and styling of this product seems quite cheap. It’s a better design than the BH-501 but the quality of the plastic molding is poor, and the silvery insert in either of the phones looks very cheap. That’s sad because I would have been willing to pay slightly more for a device that has a more elegant design.

On the whole the BH-601 is a modest improvement on the ill fated BH-501. It’s definitely the best Nokia stereo headset I’ve tried but they still have a long way to go before they deliver the headset I really deserve.

Nokia’s BH-501 looks great, sounds wonderful and is very easy to use but is also the most absurdly flimsy product Nokia have ever made.

At approximately £40, the BH-501 seems like excellent value for money. It’s got all the latest bluetooth audio profiles and is a perfect companion for a modern media-phone like my N95 or as audio output from a shiny-new mac-book. It can connect to many devices including almost any mobile phone and with an integrated mic you can make calls (as long as you speak loudly).

I used to use mine for listening to podcasts. I’m sure they would not impress an audiophile, but then again no bluetooth headphones ever could. They were just fine for listening to MP3s. I found the clarity and loudness sufficient to listen in noisy places (I used to wear mine while cycling). Sounds great, right? Unfortunately a silly design means that that your BH-501 will break and become useless long before you get your value from this product.

Did you notice that I refer to this product in the past tense? That is because every one of the three BH-501s I have ever owned has broken. Calling them fragile is an understatement.

In what might have seemed like a bold stroke of the designer’s CAD system, the BH-501 has a sort of folding mechanism where the two arches that go over the ear bend at a hinge to make the device occupy less volume. The hinged component is curved component made of bendy-moulded plastic, that looks like a curved, tapered spline. At it’s thinnest it converges to a width of approximately 5mm diameter. It’s hardly a co-incidence that every one of the devices I have tested fails at exactly this point.

Please believe me - It’s not that I have been unlucky. I’ve been through three of these. Each time I optimistically (stupidly) expected that I had just been unfortunate and that Nokia would never have marketed a fault. Each time I was wrong. All three headphones failed in exactly the same way

My verdict is that this product should be avoided, except for very light indoor use. If you have one of these devices you should never place it round your neck, like you might do with an ordinary pair of headphones. The plastic cannot cope with the torsion which results from normal body movement and will very quickly fail next time you wear them on your ears.

If you are a BH-501 owner, I’d appreciate your comments here. I’m particularly interested to know how quickly the plastic failed and what kind of treatment you gave it.

I believe that Nokia should be quick to admit that they made a mistake here and offer to recall the product. I’d be happy to buy other Nokia accessories, but I feel that to continue to market a product with a known serious fault is somewhat dishonest.

Marketing types are usually quick to point out how Apple, alone in the I.T. world “get” their customers, and how other companies (usually Microsoft) fall short of Apple’s shining example. It seems that this time Apple have out microsofted Microsoft with their lamentable iPhone, perhaps the most over-hyped and disappointing  device in the history of technology.

I cannot think of a more effective way to annoy customers off than to perpetrate a monumental bait and switch campaign: Simply tease your most loyal, avid customers with the prospect of owning the most powerful and capable phone and then deliver it with ties to unfair contracts and surreal restrictions, and a promise that attempting to take-back your iPhone will result in exclusion from Apple’s fun-club. All you have to do is sufficiently annoy these customers and they will start telling all their friends how much they hate your products… and that is exactly what Apple just did.

Apple’s biggest crime is to threaten anybody who has unlocked their phones with the possibility that their iPhone might be rendered incompatible with future updates, or at worst completely “bricked“. Concerned by the popularity of the iPhone unlocks, Apple are clearly trying to frighten people into not unlocking their phones. And why are people so obsessed with ‘unlocking’ - it’s simply a means to restore the level of functionality we expect from any smartphone to Apple’s artificially restricted device.

We should also mention the fact that Apple also made their new devices artificially incompatible with play-list managers other than iTunes and don’t even try to use your previous generation of iPod accessories.

All the features that customers have been trying to hack back into the iPhone have been standard on mid-range Nokia phones for almost a year. Unlike Apple, Nokia provide multiple SDKs in and support for a wide range of open-source languages. While the Nokia apps may sometimes lack Apple’s bling, Nokia benefits from a wider range of applications that mostly do what you’d expect. My personal favorite is Nokia Podcasting which downloads all the audio I need without ever needing to sync to a PC. Somehow I doubt apple will ever want to do that, as it would mean revealing just how redundant iTunes has become.

I suggest Nokia should take advantage of this situation - they should let the world know what a disaster the iPhone is becoming long ahead of it’s launch in the UK. And at the same time they should remind potential customers that the they already give away for free the exact features that Apple do not want their customers to enjoy.