Skype Five – Plantronics CS60 USB www.plantronics.com

Note: We’re cheating here, because there is already an in-depth Ferret review of this product, so we’ll just revisit the main features related to this round-up.

Installation – Straightforward CD based install. Charge up and plug DECT base station into a spare USB port, slot on the headset and you’re ready to go. The only quibble is that you have to manually configure Skype to recognise the headset as the sound device, which is a step too unnecessary.

Ease of use – The headset can be set to answer when you pick it up from its stand, but I keep it set so that I have to manually answer the Skype calls. There are no real bells and whistles with this gizmo, you’re simply using it as a roaming headset when conducting your Skype calls. There’s no remote dial up available, and very little control available on the headset itself apart from volume. So from an ease of use point of view it’s pretty good. Call comes in, you slip headset on, click answer and start talking.

Voice quality – Superb voice quality as you might expect from Plantronics. Crystal clear at all ranges, and even when you’re at the limits of the range (you hear a faint bleeping as a warning) you can still talk and hear with just a little break up.

Overall value for money – $380.00/£190.00. The price is the real let down of the Plantronics, it was expensive when it first came out, and makes even less sense now that there are some seriously useful alternatives coming to market. Sure it works with more than just Skype, and yes it’s a fabulously comfortable way to VoIP chat, but it still comes over as an expense account executive toy, rather than a mass market device.

Pros – Superb sound quality, extremely comfortable for extended use and very well constructed.

Cons – Price, price, price. Limited feature set when compared with some of the newer alternatives. Software can be a little problematical.

Rating – 6.5/10

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Conclusion – My, what a difference a mere seven months makes. When we first looked at the Plantronics headset, there were almost no tools on the market that freed you from making Skype calls hunched in front of the computer like a geek gnome. Now there are products coming to market almost every day, which just shows what a user base of 200 million souls can do. So, which one would the Ferret recommend? Well it’s really down to integration for us.

Ferret Towers sports two broadband connections, a cable landline and a standard landline (but with a low rate dial-out box attached), a Sipura 2000 SIP box, three wireless DECT phones (one for the SIP) and the Plantronics hooked up for Skype. There’s a bit of telecoms here. But what I’d really like is to have a seamless way to choose on the fly – or better yet, have a box which automagically chooses for me, least cost routing style – the best route for the cheapest call. Home boxes like that will inevitably hit the market at a consumer price some day soon, but for now the nearest and most interesting offering we think is the uConnect. Sure, we love the simplicity of the Linksys, but the uConnect just has that edge when it comes to the flexibility of being able to choose Skype or landline from the one handset. Although for cheap and cheerful, the Chat-Cord takes some beating.

We’ll probably swap over from the Plantronics to the uConnect shortly, and we’ll give a long term report back to let y’all know how it works day in day out. Happy talking!

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