Stupid headset design

Monday afternoon at the moment, and I have done one job. I installed the second attempt at a bluetooth headset for a PAs desk phone. The first one broke after one day of use. I think the problem is not necesarrily the user, but the research that when into buying the product. Clearly there are great pieces of hardware to make one's life easier, and this is not one of them. It is fragile and difficult to set up, let alone a stupid design. Let me paint you a picture...

The wireless bluetooth headset has a range of attachments for your preference, from the ear-clip style to the headband with one ear, to the adjustable headband style. Cool, user choice, pretty good ideas, fine. The headset sits on a dock to charge, which wires into a power pack (a big mo-fo to step down the power because it doesn't need much), as well as wiring into the desk phone. There are about 4 cables required on top of the single cable the phone uses. OK, so we have a bluetooth headset to reduce cabling... and have quadrupled the number of cables required?

But that isn't even the stupid part of the design... one of the cables leads to this mechanical device that you attach to your desk phone with double sided sticky pads (semi-permanently). What is this mechanical device for? Well, you may well ask... For a phone that is entirely capable of being used with a range of headsets and speaker phone, no need to raise the handset at all, this is laughable. This mechanical attachment raises the phones handset in order to answer the phone or even make a call. Once raised, the call goes through the handsfree base and via bluetooth to the headset. When the call is ended by pressing the button on the headset (or one on the base) the phone's handset is lowered and the call is ended.

Have you ever heard of something so ridiculous in this day and age? It's as though the headset is trying to accomodate for phone models pre 1995 or something! You know those old telstra phones with the big square buttons? The ones that you had to wire an answering machine to, or if you were special you could use some of telstras functions by pressing various number buttons.

Not only is this handset a very silly design, it was very difficult to figure out - apparently it took 4 guys in IT looking at it to figure it out in the first place.... although I do wonder if this was not due to its complicated nature, rather the tendancy for IT guys to refuse to use the instruction manual.... either way, not only that, but the headset was physically broken within one day of operation! It was the tiny connection between the dock and the headset that charges it - it had bent and snapped right off! We sent it right back and I installed the replacement today.

I told the PA to be very careful with it because it is fragile. I hope this is the last we hear of it.