I’ve never found myself wanting or needing a bluetooth headset, the convenience of being able to make a hands free call isn’t worth the price of looking like a douche bag in my opinion. However, when I purchased my new iPhone it came with a free bluetooth headset from Jabra. Initially I had planned to just resell it, however after testing it for a weekend I have decided I will keep it.

The design of the headset makes it one of the smallest and most light weight headsets on the market. It weighs in at just under 10 grams and it just under 4cm long. Rather than using an earhook design it comes with three different sized earbuds that seem to stay wedged in my ear quite well. Initially I thought that I couldn’t get it to fit in my ear properly and played with the different sized ear buds trying to get a good feeling fit. Eventually I realized that it wasn’t mean to have the same snug feel as your typical earbud headphones. With that being said, I have been walking around my apartment all weekend with it stuck in my ear and it has never budged — even when I tried shaking my head violently to see if I could make it fall out. So even though I thought I’d like an earhook style headset better I am quite pleased with this design and have found it to be very comfortable to wear for long periods of time.

The BT8040 boasts a range of up to 10 meters (33 feet) which means you can leave your phone docked at the computer and walk around your house while chatting. I have made several calls over the weekend while doing just this and have never lost communication with the phone or noticed any difference in the voice quality.

One of the big things the Jabra BT8040 offers is A2DP Technology. What this means is not only can you use it as a headset but you can also use it to stream audio from your phone or computer to the headset. Personally I don’t find this very useful as I don’t want to listen to music in just one ear, and on top of that the iPhone does not support it. To many though, this is a big deal.

Another big thing about the BT8040 is that it has MultiPoint. This allows you to pair up to 8 devices with the headset and use two of those at the same time. When I first heard this my thought was “So what?” as I had expected any device to allow you to pair it with multiple devices, but after some research I found this wasn’t the norm. Without this feature I would have to go through the pairing process every time I wanted to switch between using it for my phone and using it for Skype — I am quite glad I do not have to go through this process. Using it on two devices at the same time, this sounds rather useless to me. The only useful scenario I can think of is if you’re listening to music from your computer using A2DP and then you get a call. The device will automatically mute the music and switch over to the call.

The Verdict

Overall I’m quite happy with this product.  I wouldn’t have purchased one on my own, as I can’t justify the price when I don’t make a lot of phone calls, but now that I have one I do find it quite useful for when I’m around the house and need to make calls. More than anything I will be using it on my laptop when I make Skype calls. I wish I had it last week when I was down in California and was using Skype for cheap long distance calls, as the built in mic on my laptop is the not the greatest quality. So if you’re someone who uses their phone a lot, especially when on the road, then this is a must have product, where-as if you don’t use your phone much then I would save yourself the $90.

Brad Fettes

A seasoned Senior Solutions Architect with 18 years of experience in technology design and implementation. Renowned for innovative solutions and strategic insights, he excels in driving complex projects to success. Outside work, he is a passionate fisherman and fish keeper, specializing in planted tanks.