Here is a quick review and summary of use of the Cardo S-800 Bluetooth Headset.
Cardo S-800 Bluetooth Earpiece
I bought this on January 1, 2009 for about $15 with shipping form 1SaleADay.com. So I wasn’t sure what to expect.
I had a Blackberry Pearl and it paired and worked wonderfully. It has 3 extra programmable buttons and saves up to 3 last numbers. I was actually very pleased with it. It was lightweight, fit well, good sound both ways, loved the options. Coupled with RIM’s Pearl’s voice dial interface, it was awesome.
Then when I switched to a G1 Google phone, I was immediately less pleased. It became pretty useless. The G1 also had a very hard time pairing with my car’s Magellan GPS and the quality was equivalent to trying to talk to someone in a pool where you are both underwater. Pretty useless. Donut 1.6 did NOT help. I quickly became accustomed to pretending BlueTooth did not exist because as far as I could use it, it did not…. BOO ON GOOGLE! (The voice dialer on the Google phones is still pretty crappy, not hands free at all! Yet another issue)
So, other than that, great little piece of hardware. However by the time I got an excellent HTC G2 phone (preceded by a MyTouch Slide 3G, not a bad phone, not incredible, also had hard time with Bluetooth/voice dialer / genius button), the Cardo S-800 battery life had died and it would not charge after being in my electronics cabinet for the better part of a year or so.
Cardo no longer makes these little guys. They seem to specialize in cycling Bluetooth gear now.
http://www.cardosystems.com/us/homepage.
No replacement parts, out of warranty, yada yada yada. I tried taking it apart to see if I could possibly replace the battery. It was hard-wire soldered to several wires and components… hum.. Guess not.
I guess for $15 I got my couple of months of use with the Blackberry out of it and that was it.
Trash binned.
So I recently bought a Motorola HK-100 for about $14.00… A simpler device than the Cardo S-800. I’ll let you know how that works out.