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Review Nokia BH501 bluetooth stereo headphones

As I have pre­vi­ous men­tioned I am pretty hard on head­phones and my cur­rent pair of Koss KSC-75 head­phones only las­ted 10 months. As my last three pairs of head­phones all had prob­lems with their wir­ing and my Dopod 838Pro needs a spe­cial adapter for a stand­ard head­phone jack which does cause me prob­lems. So I decided to try a pair of bluetooth ste­reo head­phones. After a quick look around the reviews on the net, I settled on a pair of Nokia BH501s that were on spe­cial in a local phone store.

They con­nec­ted to both the Mac­Book Pro and Dopod 838Pro without a prob­lem. Switch­ing the head­phones between the laptop and phone is quite easy. Going from phone to laptop, just requires me switch­ing the head­phones off and on and I listen­ing to iTunes. From laptop to phone, also requires a little extra work due to WM5, you need to go into set­tings > con­nec­tions > bluetooth, select the head­phones and press refresh, check the box and save and you are listen­ing to Win­dows Media Player from your phone.

I don’t have any prob­lems with recep­tion with the Mac­Book. The Dopod is another thing, mainly on the move with the phone in my pocket. With the phone in my hand it is a lot bet­ter, but on occa­sions walk­ing around the sig­nal breaks up.

My main con­cern about the Nokia BH501 is the sound quail­ity. The bot­tom end was really muddy and the first couple of hours had me really wor­ried if I could live with these head­phones. How­ever, after 10 hours of use the sound qual­ity has improved. They are no match for my depar­ted Koss KSC-75. Still hope­fully a few more hours burn­ing will improve the clar­ity of the bot­tom end.

Bat­tery life is pretty good, I have only had to recharge the head­phones once in almost 10 hours of use. But it does drain the bat­tery of the Dopod 838pro when used as a music player with a bluetooth headset.

The head­phones also include a micro­phone, so they can be used as tele­phone head­set, but I have not tested that fea­ture yet.

The main advant­age of bluetooth head­phones is no wires and I am really enjoy the free­dom offered. But the sound qual­ity and inter­fer­ence on the con­nec­tion between the phone and head­set still has not con­vince me this is the best way to listen to music.

You do not get ste­reo on a Mac­Book and Tiger straight out the box (you have to wait for Leo­pard for that), I will detail my adven­tures in get ste­reo bluetooth from the Mac­Book later.


Review after installing Win­dows Mobile 6

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This post sup­por­ted by: Head­phones Head­phones and earphones from the world’s biggest online head­phone store — iHeadphones.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 20th, 2007 at 12:01 am and is filed under Just geek . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

11 Responses to “Review Nokia BH501 bluetooth stereo headphones”

  1. Sudarshan Says:
    September 19th, 2007 at 2:54 pm

    Hi,
    I got one of these(BH 501) yes­ter­day and tried to use it with my Intel Mac­Book. It did not seem to find the head­set. I have no exper­i­ence with using Bluetooth devices on the laptop. Is there some­thing else that I have to do than run the Bluetooth setup assist­ant?
    Thanks in advance.

    Sudar­shan.

  2. Sudarshan Says:
    September 19th, 2007 at 8:15 pm

    Hi,
    Was able to fig­ure it out myself by read­ing the BH 501 manual more care­fully. I t has everything neces­sary to get it work­ing.
    Cheers.
    Sudarshan.

  3. Nick Says:
    September 19th, 2007 at 10:39 pm

    Sorry Sudar­shan about being slow to respond, good to see you have it work­ing. Note it is only mono until you get Leo­pard or hack the system.

  4. Naveen Says:
    November 26th, 2007 at 11:54 am

    hey !

    Can some­body tell me if this headset(BH-501) can be set for voice chat using Yahoo or Skype messengers ?

    Naveen

  5. Defiant Says:
    January 13th, 2008 at 11:27 am

    These head­phones make a decent set pro­du­cing decent sound.. But they didn’t last a month under nor­mal usage. I didn’t even abuse it in any way, no acci­dents, just nor­mal usage. Bad buy.

    Pros: Decent Sound

    Cons: POOR Work­man­ship
    POOR Ser­vice
    Uncom­fort­able to use
    Sig­nal eas­ily affected by phys­ical bar­ri­ers
    No Music Player Con­trols
    Weak micro­phone
    Did I men­tion the poor workmanship?

  6. Vlad Says:
    April 23rd, 2008 at 4:14 am

    hi can any­one help me? i lost my phone witch was con­nec­ted to my head­phones and now i got a knew phone… how do i con­nect it?! is there a reset but­ton or something ?!

  7. Rick Poynter Says:
    August 18th, 2008 at 9:06 pm

    Thought sound, com­fort and func­tion­al­ity were okay, but they’re too flimsy. The left side moul­ded plastic con­nector between earphone and neck­band broke at the nar­row­est point, with much less than abus­ive force. My busi­ness is plastics raw mater­i­als and I’d say this was the res­ult of a design fault, a mould­ing fault or both. Nobody at Nokia was will­ing to accept any respons­ib­il­ity and I’d only had them around 3 months. No parts avail­ab­il­ity so unless you want to try to repair them your­self, eg with super glue, your only option is to replace them with some­thing much more robust.

    Any­one else had this prob­lem. Haven’t seen any web reports, but I’ll bet it’s been a fre­quent prob­lem and maybe reason for tak­ing them off the market?

  8. Phuntsok Says:
    September 1st, 2008 at 10:29 am

    BH 501 sucks!!

  9. Greg Mac Says:
    September 24th, 2008 at 9:19 pm

    Had the BH-501 for 6mnths same prob­lem with the ear piece just broke no reason not abused in any­way, now I read that they dont have parts I think its time we call con­sumer affairs.

  10. jean Says:
    November 19th, 2008 at 1:06 am

    your site is very good to view with psp. thank you

  11. doremi Says:
    February 12th, 2009 at 10:13 pm

    Mine got broken as well. Nokia said that is because of mis­us­age. F*ck them I used it normally.

    Fix it with 2 com­pon­ent glue.

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