Sweet! Your boss is going to get you a plush new headset, says Gartner as wearable spending to soar almost 20%

Spending on wearable kit is forecast to jump this year by roughly 18 per cent to $81.5bn, if analyst house Gartner is to be believed. As Reg readers knows, "wearables" is a broad term that covers a disparate group of tech products, with the sole commonality that they're used while physically affixed to the user. Of these, the …

[trevorde]

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[just_some_dude]

Who needs the "sophisticated" stuff to get to $81.4B? All I really wanted was a reliable "dumb" headset that is just a headset. I was pretty shocked when I found out one of the longer-range, non-BT, headsets retail for $200+. I mean the ones with the 10+ year old DECT 6.0 tech. There's nothing particilarly "sophisticated" about them other than the price. Suffice to say I managed to make my BT headphones work for meetings with a new BT dongle for a lot less money. The BT 4.0 built into my work laptop is worthless.

[big_D]

I've been using Jabra DECT headsets for about a decade now. They are great. Generally more reliable than BT, especially in crowded environments (at a previous office, we had around 50 people in range with wireless DECT headsets.

At home I use a simple Jabra wired headset or my Sony BT cans. They are generally good enough for my home office.

[Eclectic Man]

Double vs single earpiece

When we had IP phones installed, and then a phone app on our laptops, I had to get a headset. I tried a colleague's two earphone headset, and had the extremely unpleasant sensation that my boss was 'inside the back of my head'. I ordered a single earpiece headset, and plugged a noise-cancelling earpiece into the free ear whenever there was too much background office noise. It helped to preserve what little sanity I had left at the time*. I noticed that almost everyone with a double earpiece headset, had one off ear, one on ear, during calls.

*Yes, I'm still on the anti-depressants, but a much lower dose now, thank you Covid-19 restrictions.