Fommy Product Review:

The RIM (OEM) BlackBerry Hybrid Stereo Headset provides excellent quality and comfort while only losing a bit of convenience compared to Bluetooth headsets.

Unlike most designs these days, this headset is all cable, which has its upsides and downsides. It does maintain a lot of convenience by going with a simple one button design, due to the fact that most of your other controls can simply be found at the end of the cable (IE: on your device). Regardless, for the most part, you shouldn't need to touch the device, the one button allows for voice dialing, answering/ending calls, mute and play/pause. The other upside is that because it's connected via jack, you don't have to worry about batteries or any other maintenance. Unlike many wired units this one has an excellent cable length, neither being cripplingly and annoyingly short or far too long, it's perfect for a device at your hip or in your bag. Of course, considering the name, the unit delivers excellent, mono or strereo audio directly into your ears.

The big downside is the microphone/control button. The control button is in a convenient to access place, but due to the microphone hanging a fair bit below your mouth, it will probably end up picking up a lot of background noise, something that is a frequent design problem with wired heasets. The headset also includes a clip to keep the unit on you at all times and not falling to the ground when you pull it out, but it typically comes unattached to the unit, so make sure you put the cable through the hook so you don't lose it, something that is quite easy to do in my experience.

As far as comfort goes, you have a few different options. It comes with the regular soft rubber earbud covers already in place, but it comes with two extra sets for bigger or smaller ears and once you pick the right size they are quite comfortable. There is only small issue, that may just be me, but I found that the soft rubber nature of the earbuds made them fall out frequently, even when using the larger sized earbuds. This is something that I think could be easily remedied by reinforcing them or making them out of a different material entirely.

In conclusion, this is a very comfortable headset that delivers excellent audio quality.