Can you hear me now…
I got a cheap Bluetooth headset at Christmas to use with the PS3 and while it worked it wasn’t very good. It looked and felt cheap, and there was an audible hiss when using it. So when I saw the Official headset back in stock at Gameplay I thought it was worth a punt.
Straight out of the box its much nicer and comes with a USB charging cradle. On the surface its functionality is standard Bluetooth headset but that’s because it comes with great big ‘gotcha’.
The headset can be paired in one of two ways, either by connecting the USB cable to the PS3 or going through a standard wireless discovery pairing. On first look of the booklet there doesn’t seem to be much difference other than ease of pairing and since I had charged the headset from the computers USB ports and didn’t have the cradle attached to the PlayStation I opted for the discovery mode pairing.
Wrong choice.. I then spent the next hour trying the find the battery gauge indicator that I’d seen mentioned in a user review.
If you read the manual again, buried casually in the middle of a preamble text before the detailed pairing steps of the two options, is this text.
“Additional features will be available on your headset when you update the PS3™ system to version 2.5 or higher, but only if you pair using a USB cable.”
Obviously on first read the combination of PS3 and updates caused my brain to skip that part however this is the only mention it gets and in addition to the lack of any other urging you to use a preferred method there is no mention anywhere of what these ‘features’ might be.
The features are in fact the elusive heads up display panel showing headset status such as charge level and volume, but also a HQ mode that delivers crystal clear audio. You’d have thought that it would be worth at least a mention?
