One of the most-discussed weak points of the Palm Treo 700p is its miserable bluetooth headset support. Palm’s Treo 680 is said to have an improved bluetooth system, and should theoretically work well with headsets. Logitech provided TamsPalm with a loaner of their Mobile Freedom Headset – a bluetooth headset with volume buttons and a single multifunction knob.
After pairing the Treo 680 with the bluetooth headset, connecting the headset to the Treo was a matter of pressing the button(if the bluetooth radio of the Treo was turned on). The Treo’s bluetooth stack then showed a small “headset enabled” icon instead of the regular bluetooth one:
Accepting and rejecting calls with the Mobile Freedom headset worked well. A single press of the multifunction button, and the Treo 680 went to work. Interestingly, the Treo played its own ringtone via its speaker system. The headset has its own jingle, leading to two jingles hitting my ear at the same time. Adjusting call volume with the buttons worked well, too.
Call quality was very clear on a range of up to 3 meters – once a bigger wall was in between or the distance got bigger, call quality began to degrade a bit, but remained on Treo 600 niveau for up to 5 to 7 meters.
However, this is where the Treo 680’s bluetooth headset support ends. PocketTunes stubbornly played its tunes via the loudspeaker and Voice Memo ignored the headset’s microphone, too. Apparently, the bluetooth headset is not available to the sound manager but is rather only used by the Phone app.
Overall, the Treo 680 supports bluetooth headsets. I used the Mobile Freedom Headset for about 30 minutes and experienced no crashes or serious lags. Of course, more integration and a higher range would have been cool to have – but a person who usually is close to his Treo shouldn’t have any problems!
What did you experience? Which headset do you use with your Treo?
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I use the treo 680 in combination with a parrot Evolution 3000 bluetooth carkit. Normally this works fine, but…
when entering the car and starting the engine, it takes between the 10 seconds to 2 minutes before the treo discovers the parrot (my old Sony Ericsson T630 used to do the discovery in a couple of seconds).
When leaving the car (thus shutting of the engine) the treo mostly refuses to detect that the bluetooth connection has been dropped, thus the first phone call the treo needs to be manually switched to normal phone mode…
this is really annoying.
Yes, i have experience the same issue.
1) phone never recognizes that bluetooth
handsfree has been severed so manual switching
is required. Annoying, but I’m begging to get
used to it. Is this actually keeping the radio
in a higher state of battery useage I wonder?
2) The 680 also will not give my car access to my
contacts. The list in my BMW shows only the
quick dial numbers listed on the star page. My
older 650, my wife’s Razr, and a HTC 8525 show
up as ‘pda’s in the car with full access to contacts list. Just not the 680.
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I use Plantronics Voyager 520 BT with my Treo 680.
Its only 3days since I gout the BT. My issues are that I have to recycle the BT power to get any call.
I wish tere is a fix or update for the Ptune but alas
Hi,
in fact, expect an update on this soon.
I currently use a JayBird JB200 with my Treo and am very very happy!
Best regards
Tam Hanna