I have spent a lot of time hunting for the perfect mobile phone. I have been using a Nokia E61i most recently and have been very pleased with it. I do, however, take issue with one thing. I never bought into the whole super wide form factor with a qwerty keyboard on the bottom. I find it awkward to hold up to my face.

But then I realized something - for the majority of my lengthy phone calls I use a bluetooth headset for comfort. I started with a Jabra number which was mediocre at best for comfort and poor for quality. But I was pretty uninitiated in the world of headsets. I moved on to a second Jabra, this one even less comfortable but slightly higher quality. Still, it did not do well with holding a connection. More recently I became frustrated with that, too. Neither of these units are worth mentioning the unit number of - I have come to believe that Jabra products are just too low-end for me. Probably good for a casual user, but not for me. I fancy myself a power user.

Recently I moved on to a Nokia BH-900. It looked really slick, and I was excited to try it out. It was a little on the large side, and it had a boom mic which I thought was kind of cool. When it arrived I was a little bit surprised to find it was mostly plastic. I don't know why I was so surprised; plastic is a great way to make things lighter. I was, however, disappointed to find that the unique claw system that replaces the standard ear hook just wasn't terribly comfortable for me. I managed to put up with it for about two days, but that's when I accidentally broke it while fiddling with something I honestly had no business fiddling with. All in all I felt the sound quality was good and the unit was built pretty solid, but I chose not to replace the unit since it just wasn't that comfortable anyway.

So I moved on to my most recent purchase. On the suggestion of a friend, I bought a Plantronics Explorer 340. For years now, Plantronics has been associated in my mind with high quality telephone head sets. I'm not sure why it took me so long to make the leap that if they were so great on land lines they're probably pretty good wireless accessories, too. The head set arrived today and my immediate impression has been so good that I feel compelled to write about it here prior to even using it on a long call.

The first thing I noticed about the new head set is that the ear hook is pretty stiff, and the hinge that allows the hook to move away from the unit is on a weak spring that will hold the unit snug to the wearer's ear. I also noticed that the ear piece itself has a little, well, I'll call it a pipe on it that sort of slips into the ear canal to help with volume. The side effect of all of these things combined is that the ear hook, while stiff, is able to be significantly looser than any headset I have ever worn before because the spring and the ear pipe both help provide additional support. Because that support is spread across so many parts of my ear, the unit actually feels lighter and more comfortable than I suspect it otherwise would. The sound quality seems pretty good based on my couple of test calls, and the volume is above average. I do, however, find the toggle button to be a little awkward.

So we'll see how this goes as it gets more use.