From TNPC issue #4.24...

Plantronics S-10 Telephone Headset

by T.J. Lee
November 29, 2001

I've talked about telephone headsets and down and dirty solutions for the small office home office worker in past issues of The Naked PC. I really like having my hands free when dealing with the phone so I can type any notes necessary or just get other work done while talking.

As many of you know I've worked out of my house for the past 10 years or so and I've tried a number of different solutions. The first decision is if you can be tethered or if you need the additional freedom of a cordless solution. Before moving to Central California my office was such that a tethered headset was all I needed. I used an inexpensive $60 Plantronics SP-05 for years. I added a 12-foot telephone handset extension cord and I could not only get to every corner of my office but I could make it to the kitchen and even reach the coffee maker.

When I moved, the layout of my new house demanded a cordless solution and rather than spend $300-400 for a full-blown state of the art cordless headset from Hello Direct, I went low tech and bought a cordless telephone with a belt hook and headset jack at the local Radio Shack for about $80 total (as discussed in TNPC #2.23). I do have two complaints about this solution. First, I seem to go through a couple of the cheapie $20 generic headsets each year. Second, the volume controls would not let me turn up the incoming volume enough to hear the person I was talking to comfortably without my own voice screaming in my ear. Granted this was a problem only with some of the people I talked to on the phone, usually those also using a headset of some kind, but it was quite annoying.

Once again I'm working outside of the house and after my first day on the job I asked my new boss what practical joker picked out the phone system? The handset was designed to torture the person that tried to cradle it between shoulder and ear. I was directed to the speaker button and that was that. Well, I don't like putting people on speakerphone any more than most callers like being on one, so once again I was thinking headsets.

A tethered solution would work just fine so I dug my old Plantronics SP-05 out of the back of equipment closet and hauled it down to my new office. But no matter what configuration I tried I could not get it to work with the office's digital phone system. The SP-05 is long out of date according to the helpful folks at Plantronics, and only works on about 40% of the phone systems on the market today. But the S-10 model (retail $99) is the current replacement for the SP-05 workhorse.

I tried out the S-10 and I think it's a winner. It has the same straightforward hookup as the SP-05 and there's a ten-setting configuration slide switch on the side that lets you click through the settings to find the one that works best with your phone. That's a lot better than the SP-05's four settings that forced you flip two switches through various combinations of on/off. But the killer feature for me was the dual volume controls. You have one control for the earpiece (the S-10 comes with a single-ear headset) and another for the microphone.

There is no annoying feedback where you hear your own voice in the earpiece, and I like this a lot. The headset comes in the traditional over-the-head configuration but it can be switched to a hook-on-the-ear set up. I didn't think much of that looking at the pictures but decided I'd give it a try. It's surprisingly lightweight and while it takes a bit of practice to slip it on your ear I think I'm getting hooked on the unobtrusiveness of the small earpiece. And my hair, such as it is, remains unmussed. The unit's sound is great and again it would be easy to add an extension to the headset cord if I want more "freedom."

http://www.TheNakedPC.com/t/424/tr.cgi?jim1

You can reach T.J. Lee at:
mailto:tj_lee@TheNakedPC.com

Return to Top

TNPC Hot Tips:

• Email out of control? Spam filling your inbox? People trying to steal your identity? Same here - until I applied these tips. You can too in a new multimedia e-book. Tame Your Email.

• DO YOU MAKE THESE MONEY MISTAKES? Do you know that trying to pay off your high interest rate debts first and/or paying extra on more than one debt is the SLOWEST way to get out of debt? Don't make these same mistakes. Learn more at by clicking here...