Plantronics has been in the sound business for many years, so I was very excited to try these new headphones out.  Yet, I was also apprehensive.  Personally, I don't care for in-ear headphones.  When properly inserted, they usually feel like they're so far in your ear that you can feel them touching your brain.  But if any company can make them right, Plantronics can.  Their set came with 3 pairs of different sized earbuds, and I found a pair that fit and felt great.  Here's what the contents looks like:

Package Contents

At the bottom middle is the pendant that operates the unit, there is an audio out cable, a microphone with call control button at the far bottom right, an AC charger, and the earphones.

Let's take a closer look at the pendant.  You can use the included lanyard and hang it around your neck, or you can clip the pendant to your shirt.

The pendant controls nearly all the functions.  The clip is on the back.  There is a 2.5mm jack on the top, which I find curious because most headphones use 3.5mm jacks.  They did include an audio out cable that can be used to connect the pendant to a stereo.  The cable is a 2.5mm to 3.5mm cable. 

I found it very easy to pair the 260 to my Nextel i580 phone, my Axim x50v running wm2003se and a Sprint PPC 6700.  The 260 utilizes the A2DP bluetooth profile, which allows you to wirelessly listen to music and answer phone calls without the need for an adapter.

Plantronics wants to give their customers the combination of bluetooth and the superior sound quality of in-ear headphones.  But how do they combine the extra bulky equipment needed with the tiny in-ear headphones?  They simply created a pendant solution.  The oddity is that the left earphone wire is far shorter than the right one.  Furthermore, this solution is really no different than carrying an mp3 player with headphones.

How do they perform?

I was able to listen to music and answer calls with no problem.  They connected to all three devices with no problem.  Everything was going well.  In-ear headphones should provide great sound at lower volume than other types of headphones, while also providing inherent noise cancellation effects, because the headphones form a seal in your ear.  These did that.  But they didn't seem to play very loudly.  I slowly increased the volume on the pendant, using the Audio Visual Remote Control Profile (AVRCP) with TCPMP (the Core music player software).  The buttons on the pendant contain the volume, track, pause, play etc. that control the remote device.  The first time I used it, it worked fine.  But what I found confused me at first.  If you press the pendant control buttons faster than once every five seconds or so, the sound begins to skip.  This happened to me consistently, and would not stop until I stopped the player and loaded a new song.  This did not happen with my non-AVRCP dongle that I use on my iPod, however.  I don't know the cause, but it has also been documented by Menneisyys here.  It may just be the HP bluetooth stack that we are using on our Axims.  When I change the volume on the Axim, I had no problems. 

I enjoyed the sound from the headphones, but they didn't get very loud.  They did isolate sound fairly well, however.  In comparison, my Anycom bluetooth headphones worked perfectly well with the same bluetooth stack.  I did find them to work perfectly well up to about 30 feet.

The headphones worked much better with my phones, where volume is not such an issue.  When a phone call comes in, you just press the call control button on the headphone cable, and the music shuts down and the call comes in. 

Battery

The battery lasts a long time.  Plantronics boasts seven hours of listening time, nine hours of talk time, and 200 hours of standby time.  All I know is, after the initial charge a couple weeks ago, I have recharged it since.  And it also has a mini USB charger, which means you can charge off your computer.

Summary

Bluetooth earpieces for phones are mainstream now, but bluetooth headsets are not.  Why don't the Zune, iPod, Sandisk Sansa and all the other mp3 players out there offer bluetooth?  Could it be because most people don't know how to download an HP bluetooth stack or play around with AVRCP and manipulate similar files?  The people who read articles like this one are the early adopters.  We are the guinea pigs.  We are playing around with cutting edge technology, and in order to be able to use it, we have to accept that this technology may not work right out of the box.

So how does the Plantronics Pulsar 260 fare? 

1st the Good:

• They have converted me to an in-ear fan, so I give them a high score for that. 
• The sound was good, and it cancelled outside noise well. 
• I liked the creative way they gave me in-ear headphones with bluetooth technology, without adding bulk to my ears.

Now the part that needs improvement:

• the AVRCP causes intolerable skipping when pressed too often
• Too many cables - feels like a wired mp3 player
• volume not high enough

Buy them at Plantronics for $109.95

Hardware Specs

Listen Time: Up to 7hrs
Talk Time: Up to 9hrs
Standby Time: Up to 200hrs
Range: Bluetooth standard 10 meters
Headset and Pendant Weight: 25 grams
Battery Type: Lithium Ion Polymer
Speaker Frequency Response: Telephony 300Hz to 36000 Hz (CVSD), Stereo Audio 20 Hz to 20kHz(16-bit 48kHz SBC Coding)
Impedance: 32+-4 Ohms x 1 kHz
Distortion: < 5% to 19kHz
Version: Bluetooth 2.0
Supports Bluetooth hands-free headset A2DP, AVRCP and GAVDP profiles