I have tried out two 3G phones that work on the Cingular Network, the LG CU500 (a flip phone) and the Samsung SGH-i607 (a.k.a. Blackjack) Windows Mobile smart-phone. Both devices support the A2DP Bluetooth profile, for connecting stereo Bluetooth headphones to listen to stereo audio in movies and music, but…
The thing that annoys me is that when I have a standard Bluetoothheadset (such as the Motorola HS850) paired and connected to the phones I can only use it for call audio! Both phones don't send a mono sound signal out to the headset, even though they only have a mono speaker on the phone! Instead, they insist on blasting the audio from whatever video I'm watching out of their speakers, to annoy everybody else around me. The Blackjack is even so annoying that when I'm dialing a call it sends DTMF tones out the speaker, (again, to annoy anybody around me) and only switches to the Bluetooth headset when the call is established.
The Nokia 9500 (which, to be fair, doesn't support stereo) at least did things right. When a Bluetooth headset was attached, ALL AUDIO went out to the Bluetooth headset. This included beeps generated by moving around the menus, game audio, music player audio, video audio, and yes, call audio.
Yes, I realize that stereo is better than mono and I should go out and pay big bucks for a pair of Bluetooth headphones if I really want to experience the beauty of stereo sound, but why couldn't they support a
mono sound export when the user doesn't have an A2DP supporting Bluetooth device? If anybody knows of a 3G phone that does bluetooth audio to mono (non-A2DP) headsets, please let me know…
Update: My new Motorola Razr V3xx phone works the way you'd expect! If you have a sterio A2DP headset, it works, but if you just have a mono headset, it downsamples the audio and exports it to the plain old headset profile device! This is one of the main features that made me choose the V3xx over the LG CU-500. Plus, it exports ALL phone audio (including such things as the output of java applications), not just the media player audio. Also, a reader reports that the Motorola Q also offers this feature. I guess the general answer is that Motorola got this feature "right" (perhaps their new Linux/Java base operating system made it easy for them?).
