Fommy Product Review:

The RIM (OEM) BlackBerry Original 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. The cable does have a decent length, I do think it could be just a tad shorter though.

The big thing that differentiates between this headset and BlackBerry's usual fair is that instead of being a standard stereo style design, this one features a single earbud which helps for multitaskers who always want to have one ear open. The other big change is that the control/microphone is positioned near the earbud, which helps to deliver much better outgoing audio quality than most other wired headsets due to better proximity to the mouth. The downside is obviously, no surround sound style audio; while the other is that the control button is in a much more inconvenient place.

The downside with this wired unit and other wired units is still the proximity to the mouth, this one improves on the standard design significantly, but the unit is still likely to pick up a lot of background noise due to a microphone that picks up in multiple directions. The headset also includes a clip to keep the unit on you at all times and not falling to the ground whenever 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.

The unit is a bit below average as far as comfort level goes, and it includes no options for people with bigger or smaller ears. I frankly found that the unit was just too large to be a comfortable fit, even with the soft cover. Of course, ear sizes vary wildly, so it each his own.

This wired headset has an interesting design that sets it apart from most of the others, but it could use a couple of improvements as far as comfort and convenience goes.