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Helium Digital HDBT-990 Bluetooth wristband gets reviewed, given 3.5 Jack Bauers
Looking to get a Bluetooth earpiece without actually upping your tool factor by 40x or so? Good luck. Helium Digital's so-called alternative (that'd be the HDBT-990 Bluetooth wristband) was recently reviewed by our iPhone-lovin' pals in the Great White North, and while they found it to work well when it came to handling calls without actually using the speaker and microphone within the iPhone 3GS, everything else about it was ho hum at best. There's no inbuilt LCD for watching Caller ID streams, the mini-USB jack was "flimsy," and there's still the issue of this unit being at least somewhat unsightly. It's also $90, which puts it just north of the all-important "ah, who cares" range for most of you price-conscience consumers. Hit the source link for their full impressions, but don't be shocked if you come away still in search of the aforementioned mystery device.
Helium Digital straps your wrist with HDBT-990 Bluetooth communicator
This Helium Digital HDBT-990 Bluetooth wristband could be a godsend for businessmen who want to avoid sticky wires and phones to answer a call while jogging, except it does look kind of bland (too hard to add a watch?). If appearance isn't what you're after, this wristband does offer audible caller ID, A2DP (although it's unclear if you can get stereo output -- we see no headphone jack here; probably just for higher mono fidelity), noise cancellation, and vibration alert for both incoming calls and when your phone is out of range -- the latter kind of mimicking the nio Bluetooth tag. Battery-wise it'll do 4 hours of talk time and 160 hours for standby. All yours for $87 starting in February.
Helium Digital's Bluetooth headset with OLED display
We've never really understood these displays on Bluetooth headsets. They might come in handy if you had a pocket mirror on you, but would it not then make sense for the text on the display to be backwards? At any rate, Helium Digital's new HD-880 uses the OLED display for help screens in addition to the standard-issue caller ID information, useful for folks unfamiliar with the pairing process. The Bluetooth 1.2 headset offers a claimed four hours of talk time and 30 hours of standby for a suggested retail of $90.[Via SlashGear]
