I guess you get what you pay for

Had a bummer of a purchase today.  Before I left for New Orleans I decided it was time to replace my long-long Plantronics Bluetooth headset.  I loved my Voyager 510 headset, but it disappeared several weeks back.  I was going to simply replace it, when I decided to go with the next model of Plantronics headsets: the Discovery 640E.  It looked like a great deal on Buy.com.  

It finally came, and I opened the box and was amazing how small the thing was.  It comes with this holder that looks like a pen cap which also charges the headset.  The cap can clip on to this other end of the “pen” to offer a charge from a AAA battery.  It looks like a very innovative design.

Like a good tech geek, I wanted to fully charge the device before using it, which introduced the problem.  I plugged in the charger, put the thing in and nothing happened!  I fiddled and fiddled with placement of the device in the charger and the best I could do was have the thing charging for about 15 seconds before it just slipped out of place!

Talk about sensitive!  What a piece of crap!  The design looks sleek and sexy, but is fundamentally flawed!  The headset doesn’t snap into the charger, you just press it in there and hope you didn’t bend anything!  I must have removed and reinserted the headset into the charger a hundred times.  There was no way to tell if I was doing it correctly.  I must have re-read the instruction manual over 10 times, with absolutely no luck.

My individual device may very well be defective unit, and I’m praying that’s what it is.  I’m returning this to Buy.com as a defect, in which I can only exchange for the exact same product.  We’ll see if I have any luck with the next one. However I fear that the product is just poorly designed.  After owning many different kinds of Plantronics headsets I find myself questioning my future loyalty to their products.

Technorati tags: Plantronics, Discovery 640E