ReTrak, popular in the US, are now selling their range of products in the UK at retailers such as PC World, Dixons and Amazon.
You may have come across retractable cables before – often found on portable mice for laptops, they wind excess cable into real which is suspended half way along the cable length. What ReTrak have done is improved upon this, added other new technologies and then created a huge range of products. Basically, what you get are a range of electrical accessories that take up as little space as possible.
Their range includes computer, visual and audio cables along with power supplies, headphones, iPhone and eBook products, mice and even a retractable mouse mat with built-in USB hub!
For those people who only occasionally need to use a headset for a phone and don’t want the expense (or silly look!) of a Bluetooth variation1, then a wired headset is an ideal compromise.
ReTrak have improved the standard design by adding re-tractability to the cable. Otherwise it’s pretty much what you’d expect elsewhere – a button on the side lets you pick-up and drop calls and an adapter allows you to connect to both 2.5 and 3.5″ sockets.
For testing I passed this to my teenage daughter who made a number of voice recordings on her iPod Touch using the headset, which she then played back through the same headset. Quality was excellent – very clear, although background noise was equally audible. She found putting the clip over her ear tricky but liked the fact that you can pull it off and mount it the other way around, allowing you to wear this on either ear. On the back of the earpiece is a handy belt clip.
The cable is 1 metre long and the product comes with a lengthy 3 year guarantee. For the audio experts amongst you, it has a sensitivity of 119 dB, impedance of 32 ohm(s) and a frequency of 0-20 kHz.
Summary
An excellent sounding, compact wired phone headset. It can be a bit fiddly and it doesn’t filter background noise particularly well, but with an RRP of just £9.99 (inc VAT), it’s a bargain.
ReTrak Boom Mic Headset reviewed by David Artiss on 11th April 2012.
- or indeed, the power drain as you’d end up leaving Bluetooth on all the time
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