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eMeet HS100 Bluetooth headset and microphone review: simple controls, great sound
eMeet HS100 Bluetooth headset
pros and cons
- Simple flick to mute microphone
- Good noise cancelling
- Poor quality control app
- Headset tight if wearing all day
Bluetooth headsets are fine for listening to music, but not so much for conference calls where surrounding conversations can impact the quality of your online meeting.
Now eMeet has added the HS 100 headset to its range of meeting conference speakers, and it works nicely for music too.
The eMeet HS100 has a long-lasting battery and a fast charging capability — 15 minutes of charge yields up to 4 hours of usage.
There are a couple of useful features that I particularly like about the headset. Lifting the microphone arm to the vertical position will mute the microphone. This comes in handy if you want to quickly chat with someone who is not on the call.
If you want to hear what is going on in the room or pause the music you are listening to, press the left ear cup and enable or disable ambient sound.
Calls are clear and crisp, and if you want to play music through the headset, the sound has a good range, and reasonable bass levels.
To get extra features such as intelligent wearing detection, you need to download the eMeet link app. I spent a long time looking for the app. It is not on the Play store, and it's elusive even in online searches.
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There is no QR code in the user guide, and a link in the user guide to install the Windows client onto my desktop is hidden on the last page of the guide.
Eventually I discovered a link to download the Windows client version of the eMeet link app from eMeet's website itself. This should be far more clearly signposted.
Once I downloaded the Windows client, I found that the eMeet link is worse than useless.
Although I could see the wireless dongle in the client, and connect the headset to the PC using Bluetooth, I could not adjust any settings at all in the eMeet client app for the headset which should be on the left hand side of the menu above. I am not impressed with this feature at all.
If I could get to intelligent wearing detection, I would be able to automatically pause the music or mute the microphone when I take the headset off. Why aren't these features enabled by default in the headset?
I found that wearing the headset all day was really painful. I had to adjust the ear cups many times to stop the ear studs from digging into my head.
The ear cup cushions felt slightly too small for my ears and the tension in the headband squeezed the arm of my spectacles onto my head.
I could not adjust the angle of the ear cups to move my reading glasses to a more comfortable position, so I settled with them perched on top of the ear cups.
My favorite headphones have cushions that are more squared, and cover the entire ear. My ears are not large, but I found the cups uncomfortable after extended use.
However, wearing them on and off for calls meant that my ears and head had a time to relax in between calls. If you have a small head, I am sure that this would not be an issue for you and you will be able to wear these all day.
Perhaps in time, these new headphones will adjust to my head and ears and not pinch so much.
All in all the eMeet HS100 headphones are very useful for anyone who has regular conference calls and wants to be able to quickly mute their microphone with a flick of the microphone bar.
Use the code ZDNET10off on Amazon to get the eMeet HS 100 headset for $64.99 – a bargain for a quality conference headset – as long as your ears and head are not too large, and you do not need the app.