Plantronics Discovery 975 pairs beauty with brains

Plantronics Discovery 975, in and out of its charging case.

(Credit: Plantronics)

Plantronics on Thursday announced the Plantronics Discovery 975, which it touts as a luxury fashion-forward Bluetooth headset built with premium performance. It's the successor to the Plantronics Discovery 925, and it shows--the Discovery 975 inherited that skinny hairpin-like design, right down to the square diamond base.

However, the Discovery 975 carries the brains of the Plantronics Voyager Pro, with its AudioIQ2 noise canceling and WindSmart wind-noise reduction technologies.

We had the opportunity to put the Discovery 975 through its paces the past few days, and we have to say we're very impressed with it overall. Even though not everyone will appreciate the skinny pin design and the tiny controls leave much to be desired, the sound quality is really very good. Indeed, it matches the Voyager Pro in outgoing sound quality. We even tested it in windy conditions, and our callers managed to hear us loudly and clearly. They said our voice sounded natural and not at all robotic or machine-like, and the wind noise that they did hear sounded more like rain on the roof.

We also appreciate that it comes with a leather portable charging case, which we have to say reminds us a lot of a woman's lipstick case. The charging case has a little LCD screen that shows the battery life of both the headset and the case. According to Plantronics, the charging case will extend the headset's battery life three-fold--as much as 15 hours talk time total--as long as you remember to keep it in the case when not in use.

Other features of the headset include multipoint connectivity so you can connect up to two phones at once, voice prompts (to let you know if call mute is on, the battery status of the headset, and if the Bluetooth connection is lost), voice dialing support, last number redial, and more. The headset has a comfortable ear gel tip fitted over the earpiece, and you can take it on and off with ease.

The Plantronics Discovery 975 is $129.99 at retail and is available right now on Plantronics' Web site and for preorder at Best Buy and Amazon. It will also be sold in Best Buy and Apple stores in late August, and in AT&T, Radio Shack, and Sprint stores in September or October.

Read our full review of the Plantronics Discovery 975.

[Lindybomb]

Cambridge Consultants, the folks behind Bluetooth? technology, are releasing xIDE for Interface Express?, an embedded Bluetooth? application development toolkit.

Tech developers like Plantronics can now accelerate a product?s time to market, gaining access to more performance and more memory to support multi-profile Bluetooth applications without the need for a costly host-processor, saving them precious development costs.

See for yourself: http://www.cambridgeconsultants.com/news_pr249.html

[Ray.78]

Love the look of this headset, especially when it's all tucked away in its little case.
I have tried my friends Discovery 925 and if the sound quality is as good as that I will definately be putting it on my christmas list.