Best Bluetooth Headsets for the Holidays

Looking for an easy-to-use Bluetooth headset with good audio quality and lots of customization options? Check out these appealing models.

By Leah Yamshon, PCWorld

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Aliph Jawbone Icon

Aliph's Jawbone Icon series is all about style and glitz. Available in several pearly colors with design names such as "Bombshell" and "Hero," the Jawbone Icon has a compact rectangular shape with intuitive user controls consisting of an on/off switch and a call button. You can manually adjust the call volume on your phone as needed, but apart from that the Icon series offers little headset customization.

More Info | $100 (list)

Aliph Jawbone Icon

Jabra BT530

Comfort is a major focus of the Jabra BT530. This device gives you plenty of customizable options to get the best fit possible: You have two different earhooks to choose from, or you can remove the earhook entirely and use one of the six replacement gels to hold the headset in place. The navigation buttons are a little tricky to use at first, and we found the call quality slightly inconsistent, but the BT530 performs well overall and is a great budget model.

More Info | $80 (list)

Jabra Extreme

The Jabra Extreme is a terrific noise-canceling Bluetooth headset, making it an ideal device if you live or work in a busy city environment. It has an attractive silver micro-grill body and comes with different ear gels to ensure that you have the most comfortable fit possible. Although the volume buttons on the side are somewhat hard to navigate, the Extreme automatically adjusts earpiece volume in response to ambient noise, and it also has a control to correct sudden volume spikes.

More Info | $80 (list)

Jabra Stone

The cleverly designed Jabra Stone is named for its charging case--when you put the headset and charger together, the combined result resembles a smooth, polished black stone. Apart from the gimmicky name, however, the ultraportable charger helps the Stone achieve great battery life. While the touch-sensitive controls can take some getting used to, the Stone provides solid call quality due to Jabra's noise-cancellation technology and how the device handles sudden changes in volume.

More Info | $130 (list)

Plantronics Discovery 975

For an earhook-free plug-and-play Bluetooth device, check out the Plantronics Discovery 975. This 2.7-inch-long headset might seem a little on the large side, but it's easy to put on; you can adjust the location of the boom microphone to improve call quality, too. Although the Discovery 975 doesn't handle background noise very well, it does stay snugly in your ear if you're jogging or rushing from place to place.

More Info | $130 (list)

Plantronics Voyager Pro

The Plantronics Voyager Pro promises impressive wind-noise reduction during calls, and in our informal tests we found that claim to be true. This headset's somewhat clunky design has an easy-to-use call-control button and fast-responding voice-dialing capabilities, but its other buttons are a little difficult to work with. Nevertheless, it performs well overall in sound and call quality.

More Info | $100 (list)

Sound ID 510

With a wide range of comfort features and effective noise-cancellation technology, the Sound ID 510 is an innovative Bluetooth headset with smooth touch-sensitive volume control. We like its free iPhone app, EarPrint, which lets you control the headset's sound, equalization, and audio compression. Although audio quality was generally crisp and clear in our tests, some features, such as the "environmental mode," need a bit of fine-tuning in future models.

More Info | $130 (list)