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Review: Nokia BH-501 bluetooth stereo headset

Published
by
Sal
on January 15, 2008
in Gadget Reviews
. 2 Comments

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.

broken_headphones.jpg

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.

Forbidden knowledge

Published
by
Sal
on October 9, 2007
in Interesting
. 0 Comments

According to the BBC, a teenager has been arrested for the crime of possession of “The Anarchist’s Cookbook”, and having attempted to obtain some of the chemicals required to make some of it’s recipes. While the unlicensed manufacture and use of explosives has probably been illegal for a very long time, the criminalization of possession of this book seems paradoxical:

For starters, the book is still on sale on Amazon.co.uk and has been sold legally in the UK for more than 30 years. It can be downloaded for free. (If you clicked on that link then you just came into posession of this allegedly terrorist book - please make an appropriate confession at your local police station).

I’m not a fan of this book: It’s more suited to somebody wishing to commit suicide than instigate a bloody Jihad. If you really want to blow things up you would be much better off consulting the US Army’s improvised munitions handbook. This excellent and well-researched book provides all the relevant formulations and ingredients for a wide range of high-explosives, plus handy safety tips to ensure that your ‘package’ gets ‘delivered’ to the right revolutionary or diplomat.

The Anarchist’s Cookbook is amateur stuff by comparison.

The record industry: Killed by it’s own stupidity

Published
by
Sal
on October 3, 2007
in Music
. 0 Comments

Jennifer Pariser (who is Sony BMG’s chief litigator) thinks she has found the perfect scape-goat for the continued decline of the recording industy - and funnily enough it’s the same scape-goat that music execs have always blamed ever since the days of “Home taping is killing music“:

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“It’s my personal belief that Sony BMG is half the size now as it was in 2000, … thanks to piracy… when people steal, when they take music without compensation, we are harmed.”

An alternative explanation is that her company has declined because Sony BMG’s business model is no-longer relevant. We might also point out that since 2000 the record companies have invested all their limited intelligence in devising technology such as DRM or CDs with root-kits that take-over your computer, technologies which serve no purpose other than causing annoyance to people who might otherwise become Sony BMG customers.

Rather than develop new methods to engage and entertain music fans the record companies have been led by bunker-mentality lawyers like Ms Pariser who have guaranteed that companies like Sony BMG will have no role in the future of music distribution.

Why buy an official product from Sony BMG when the exact same recording can be bought from iomoio.com for a fraction of the price and without any of the annoying encumbrances. The market has found a price for music, and it’s about ten times less than what Sony BMG want to charge us. History shows that one cannot ignore the market for long before having to face the inevitable financial consequences:

As one commentator on Digg said: “I can’t wait for those idiots to go bankrupt“.

Alisher Usmanov meet Barbra Streisand

Published
by
Sal
on October 3, 2007
in Interesting
. 0 Comments

Justin McKeating’s article on the Usmanov censorship affair is a good read, because he highlights a simple fact apparently unknown to the sort of lawyers who specialize in making critical voices “Cease and Desist”. Freedom of speech is the one issue that unites just about every one of the world’s bloggers - and this incident has done a superb job of highlighting the inanity of British Libel laws, specifically the fact that any attempt to use them to silence internet speech will almost instantly result in the opposite of the desired effect.

This is yet another example of the well documented “Barbra Streisand Effect“, however with a novel twist that our quaint Libel laws and recent legal precedent from the Demon Internet case have made our British hosting companies even more risk-adverse than usual. While we can certainly blame Mr. Usmanov for his ill-considered heavy-handed litigation, we should also share the blame with cowardly Fasthosts who pulled the plug on reciept fo Usmanov’s complaints without even the most basic verification.

James Randi tackles Audiophiles

Published
by
Sal
on October 2, 2007
in Gadget Reviews
. 0 Comments

The worlds most famous skeptical investigator is famous for debunking celebrity charlatans like the nonsense-talking, spoon-bending mystic Uri Geller.  I’m glad to say that he also has time to educate the world about entirely materialistic forms of flim-flam: this week he has turned his attention to the high-end hifi industry, specifically their tendancy to sell outrageously priced “interconnects” and speaker cables to gullible “audiophiles”.

Having served my time in community radio, I can be sure that there is no audible difference between an interconnect costing 50p and one which costs £50. There is a practical difference, which is that you have £49.50 less to spend on more important studio devices.

No recording studios engineer make use of high-end cables - they use whatever they find in the studio-spares bin which is mainly cheap, disposable cables. Good recording studios are full of expensive equipment, but these are things like mixing-desks and recording devices. The interconnects between these devices will usually be twisted-pair copper or cheap fibre-optic.

The entire CD mastering process introduces so much distortion into the recording that even if the quality of interconnects and speaker-cable made a difference it would be utterly insignificant compared to the amount of ‘noise’ that is intrinsically part of any recording.

For these reasons, I expect that James Randi’s challenge will remain un-accepted for the foreseeable future.

New Nokia ads - a dig at Apple’s iPhone

Published
by
Sal
on October 1, 2007
in Companies and media
. 0 Comments

These new ads from Nokia are a not to subtle dig at their new Rival’s tendency to lock up their own products to the point of uselessness. Naturally Nokia are resorting to the old-standard of guerrilla-media, the fly-post:

nokia.jpg

I guess this is an attempt to make-known on the streets what has long been known amongst geeks and apple-fans, that Apple have seriously failed on what should have been the product-launch of the year.

There’s a fact behind this ad: At the moment Nokia have the most open mobile platform with the best support for open-source languages and freely-available development tools. If you know your stuff anybody can develop for Nokia, and make a living at the same time as you make the platform more desirable.

Apple, by contrast has done what they can to keep development tools out of User’s hands. History tells us that adoption of standards and technology does not favour control-freaks.

Sagor & Swing

Published
by
Sal
on September 30, 2007
in Interesting
. 0 Comments

I want them to play this song as the theme tune for the epic biopic about my life, or alternativly at my funeral (whichever comes first - I dont mind). This organ-funk jazz freak-out came in as a hot-tip from my free-music Guru, Marvin Suicide whose taste is always impeccable and whose hunger for fresh sounds never seems to diminish.

Sagor & Swing

The tune is by a Swedish beat combo called “Sagor and Swing” - according to Wikipedia they’ve split up a few years ago, but their sweet sounds are only just starting to reach the rest of Europe. If you appreciate this hyper-organ funk sound then you can download a few more of their tracks for free courtesy of their record label.

Reunited with my bike

Published
by
Sal
on September 27, 2007
in Cycling
. 0 Comments

After a painful couple of days without my trusty bicycle I am now re-united with it, courtesy of Mosquito Bikes of Islington (just round the corner from Essex Road station).

They transformed my creaky wreck into a gleaming, silent speed-machine. Their deluxe service is expensive, but the bike feels better than it did when it was brand-new, which means it was money well-spent. For what it’s worth, they have my seal of approval and my short-term gratitude, until I manage to wreck my bike again.

Ian Dale’s Top 100 Liberal Democrat Blogs is nothing but Link-bait

Published
by
Sal
on September 26, 2007
in General
. 1 Comment

It came as some surprise to see my own site linked to from Ian Dale’s political mega-hub, particularly as I’ve not published one even vaguely political story this year. So I’m unable to glean quite how I achieved a rank of #75 in the lib-dem chart, and a higher rank than the official blog of the Liberal Democrat party leader.

Ian states that his rankings are a reflection of ‘votes’ cast by his panel. All I can say is that this sort of voting reminds me of the kind they have in Florida where the actual number of votes cast have an estranged relationship with the results. Perhaps a few of those “hanging-chads” got mis-counted as votes for Stodge.org?

I’m certain that none of the Lib-Dem supporters would have singled out my site for a vote. I never solicited anybody to vote for me, nor was I aware that this competition existed until I was mysteriously revealed to be 75th best in the land. I never got involved with the debates on the other LibDem blogger’s sites, in short I made no effort and did not actually deserve to be on any ranking.

I can be pretty certain that any votes allegedly cast for Stodge.org are either accidental or imaginary - and almost certainly below the threshold of what is statistically meaningful when compiling a ranking.

If I was feeling charitable, I’d say his methodology is dubious - at at worst entirely bogus. Would it be fair to conclude that the whole affair is link-bait, intended to persuade the gullible and eager for publicity to link back to Mr Dale’s blog and thus boost his profile in the web-o-sphere?

Apple’s iPhone is a public relations disaster

Published
by
Sal
on September 24, 2007
in Gadget Reviews
. 0 Comments

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.