Review: Jabra BT5020 Headset with Bluetooth Hub

What do you do when you need to switch between your home or office phone and your mobile? You turn to Jabra.

One of the more irritating things about being in a busy office is the jump from your mobile phone to your office phone. It’s as if someone has intentionally driven a wedge between anything usable when you’re working.

If you are to work quickly, comfortably, and professionally, how are you to switch between a phone call to the clients and then a quick mobile call to the family?

It seems like an impossible task. Here we are in a fairly modern technological society and there’s no way to link us to and from our communication devices in the modern office.

Until now.

Jabra have taken the need for compatibility and connection in society and blended it with the constant need for design perfection.

Boxed in with the Jabra BT7010 Bluetooth hub, you’ll be able to use the Jabra BT5020 Bluetooth headset with practically anything. The hub is stylised to be simple while elegant and the setup is easy to do once you get it out of the box.

The controls for the hub can be found underneath the smooth plain matte black cover giving you volume control, ringing options, as well as the notes to help you set the hub up correctly. The hub is certainly inconspicuous and while some people might prefer an extravagant object that really looks unique, I quite like the sleek and hidden look that the BT7010 has adopted. It feels as if it could sit really anywhere in the home and no extra notice would be taken of it.

The BT5020 headset is much the same in this regard. It’s not like Jabra’s JX10 which has been designed by a Danish designer and probably belongs in it’s own art gallery. It’s simple. It doesn’t require any effort to switch it from your left to your right ear. It doesn’t look like the child of a nightmare designer rejected from the Bauhaus. The BT5020 is what it is and it makes no attempt to be anything other than a solid and lightweight Bluetooth headset. The buttons click well, the battery lasts for around 10 hours of talking time and 300 of standby, and overall it is an easy Bluetooth headset to use that’s more comfortable than you’d probably expect.

Put all of this together and you have what seems like it’ll be an easy device to use. To get started, simply plug in the fairly unobtrusive power pack into the hub and attach the necessary phone cords from your handset to your hub and your more or less ready to go. You will need to sync the BT5020 headset to the hub as well as your mobile phone, but that’s a pretty simple button-pressing process that we’ve all gone through at least once before.

From then on, you’ll see that this Jabra headset & Bluetooth hub combination aims to please. The call quality is excellent though depending on the quality of the land-line, you might find that it’s not up to the standard of the usual crystal clear clarity that you might find on other devices. It’s also easy to switch to and from your mobile to your desk as you probably won’t even notice it save for the times that you have to pick up the handset.

It’s the “picking up the handset” part that might let you down a little, however.

While the technology is excellent and the sound quality mostly up to Jabra’s typically exceptional standards, you still keep having to lift the phone handset up to make or receive a call. It seems a small issue but it can’t actually be a little irritating. One look at the BT5020 headset and you might think to yourself “why doesn’t the headset’s phone button virtually lift the handset for me?”

Because that’s really what it should be. If you’ve already got a headset that allows you to jump between the various means of communication in your office or home as you walk around, a handset lifter would have been an excellent inclusion.

As it stands though, the combination of the BT5020 headset and BT7010 Bluetooth Hub works excellently. It’s hard to find a better solution than what this offers especially in a package that’s designed so well.

Should you buy it?: If you find that you need to make that transition between your mobile and your home or office phone, then yes, I’d take a look at this.

Product: Jabra BT5020 Headset with Bluetooth HUB

Vendor: Jabra

RRP: $329.00

Website: Site name

Reviewed by Leigh D. Stark