The Moment of Tooth

We’ve been known to gripe about Bluetooth around here. We had to wait thirty whole seconds for it to pair! This one time it stopped working for a second and we had to connect it again! Life sucks! On a meta-level, the Bluetooth bandwagon can be a real eye-roller, with every two-bit manufacturer acting like slapping that runic symbol on some gadget is a sure-fire way to make a fast buck.

But we admit it: Bluetooth is pretty impressive.

Ones and zeroes shooting invisibly through the air is magical enough. For devices from different manufacturers and different tech ecosystems to be able to do that together is about as close to miraculous as consumer electronics get at the moment.

Of course you notice the connections that drop more than the ones that effortlessly work. That’s human nature. It’s also human nature to get extra frustrated when a problem is invisible and intangible. It’s not like we can spot a broken cable or a stripped gear to blame for a broken Bluetooth connection. When your only recourse is to ask “why isn’t it working?”, that can lead to “why doesn’t this ever work?”, never mind all the times it works just fine.

Bluetooth’s open, universal standard is actually one the reasons for its perceived unreliability. There’s an awful lot of cheap, crappy Bluetooth stuff out there giving old King Harald a bad name. To fully harvest the bounty of Bluetooth, it makes sense to go with an established, respected brand. The kind of brands who hire the best engineers and designers and QA people. The kinds who aren’t afraid to add an additional eight cents’ worth of plastic to keep the thing running.

It just so happens Motorola is one of those brands. This headset offers some nifty frills, like the padded collar thing, and some magnets that keep the earbuds from flopping around when not in use. But the backbone of its appeal is its backbone. It’s a sturdy piece of Motorola audio gear from a company that’s been in the radio/telephone biz since 1928.

So there. We said it. Bluetooth is pretty amazing, especially when it’s used with decent equipment. Now buy these and get them out of here so we can go back to griping. That comes so much more naturally to us.