I spend a lot of time wearing a headset, and while they’re perfectly serviceable headsets, the Poly Blackwire 3300’s provided by my work don’t fully meet my needs of being able to slip away and grab a glass of water during a meeting. I also wanted the ability to pair my headset with my phone at the same time as my PC, so I can answer calls on both. With that in mind, I’ve been trying out a couple of different bluetooth enabled headsets over the last few weeks.
The first is the Poly Voyager 6200 UC. This retails for £261 on Poly’s site, but you can find them considerably cheaper if you shop around. I purchased this headset myself, and Poly had no influence or input on this review.
The most obvious thing about this headset is the appearance. It doesn’t look like a headset at all. The microphones are in a neckband that rests around your neck, and it has in-ear buds that look to the casual observer like you’re just listening to music. Personally, I love the design, but I have had coworkers interrupt a couple of meetings because they didn’t realise I was on a call. The neckband does have a busy indicator, but if you’re the only one in the office who has one of these, your coworkers probably won’t realise that’s what it is.
In the box, you get a Poly BT600 Bluetooth dongle, a semi-rigid case, USB-A to Micro-USB cable, and charger base.
On the neckband, you have power, volume, mute and a Teams button, which doubles as play/pause when connected to your phone. All are intuitively located once you’ve gotten a feel for them. You also have a connector for the charger base, and a micro-USB connector so you can just plug it in anywhere if needs be.
The audio quality is excellent, comfortably matching any of my music-specific earbuds. The noise cancellation was a little disappointing – you can’t really notice much difference in normal office background noise, and I have had people ask me to mute while in a meeting with a noisy coworker sitting behind me despite enabling noise cancellation.
The Poly Lens app, along with the Poly bluetooth dongle, is what makes a world of difference to this device in an office setting. It opens up a whole range of settings for the various beeps and voice notifications given by the headset. The most valuable is the ability NOT to send your PC notifications to the headset. I have previously had my Amazon Echo Buds paired to both my laptop and phone, and the second or two of silence every time you get a Teams message will really ruin an audiobook.
Other features you can tweak are whether you get feedback beeps at all volume levels, or just max and min volume (or none at all), enable/disable the busy light, auto disable ANC after a period to save battery, and tweak wireless settings which impact battery life, such as streaming music, HD Voice, and extended bluetooth range.
Battery life is advertised as 16 hours listen, 9 hours talk – I haven’t tested this, but can confirm it’s enough for a full days work with music on.
Overall, I really like this headset. It’s exceptionally comfortable, superbly portable, and sounds great. The biggest downside is that your coworkers might not realise you’re on a call and inadvertently interrupt you.
