Sony Ericsson HBV-100 review: Sony Ericsson HBV-100
A good way to add Bluetooth wireless chat to your mobile and your VoIP calls in one hit.
Alex Kidman
Alex Kidman is a freelance word writing machine masquerading as a person, a disguise he's managed for over fifteen years now, including a three year stint at ZDNet/CNET Australia. He likes cats, retro gaming and terrible puns.
Design / Features
The HBV-100 VoIP kit is an interesting beast -- we're normally led to believe that mobile phone companies aren't all that keen on VoIP, given that their bread and butter lies traditionally with telcos and fixed cost mobile calls.
Sony Ericsson HBV-100
The Good
The Bad
The Bottom Line
The HBV-100 gives you a best of both worlds approach, as it happens given that it will happily double as a regular Bluetooth headset for compatible mobiles. It ships with a regular enough single-ear headset, as well as a Bluetooth dongle for enabling Windows-based PCs to pair with it.
Performance
Once we'd charged the headset -- a rather dull 8 hour process -- we could pair it simply enough with a regular Bluetooth mobile, or use the dongle to pair it to a PC. One nice factor here is that it's a driverless install, as the USB dongle carries its own drivers on it. Voice quality is always a highly variable thing, and once you add VoIP into the equation, you're opening up an entirely separate can of worms.
Still, our tests with the HBV-100 were mostly positive, and it opens up yet another way to take your Skype calls into the wireless and very-nearly-PC-free realm.
