Motorola Endeavor HX1 Review.

A Google search for "HX1" will normally only get you a "Sony Cyber-shot DSC-HX1" review, which barely helps.

Recently, we have acquired a Motorola HX1 bluetooth headset. We don't do unboxing, as there should be a plentiful of them on Youtube. We did, however, take a couple of photos of our very headset.

Price
We got this piece of small headset in Hong Kong at HK$1280 (€110), it was easily the most expensive bluetooth device we've bought - we could have gotten the Jawbone Prime thing below this. We picked the Motorla "清" Endeavor HX1. It's the second product with a Chinese model name - the previous one was the A1200 "明" Linux based phone.^

Setting up
I couldn't wait to unpack the phone in office, I dismounted the packaging on metro. Setting up a connection is amazingly easy and user-friendly - as I wore the headset and turn it on, it has internal voice instruction in English to help me pair up the machine with my HTC Diamond. It took me no time to finish the whole pairing thing. Note that I didn't even need to read the manual.

Voice Quality
I tried to make a call when I was in an East Rail Train, the railway notorious to every Hong Kong citizen as each compartment of the train is equipped with five televisions which keep spamming ads very loudly, damaging the ears of the passengers. My friend took my call and found that my background voice is acceptable and my voice was able to be heard quite clearly. Then I tried to activate the stealth mode with a single press on a button which I suspected to be the stealth button, and poof! I heard "Stealth Mode On", while my background noice was vanished, as reported by my friend.

My friend was astonished and could not believe that I was on the loudest train on the world. He commented my voice was a little bit "stacked" though. (After reading manual, it does say the voice will be a bit distorted when the stealth mode is on)

Further tests involving talking in front of a loudspeaker was equally impressive for the recepient (although you might be unable to hear them because of your own noisy environment)

Comfortability
Despite that the package was bundled with two sets of clips and earplugs of various sizes, we found it quite a challenge to obtain the best result. Both the two earplugs will make the ear painful after using for an hour or two. Besides, it would need experience to calibrate the HX1 for the other side of phone to hear clearly. A misplacement inside the ear canal could result in hearing hasard on the other side of phone.

Overall comment
Despite being dissatisfied by the awfully designed phones, Motorola impressed us this time with the preipheral. If you need to work or stay in a noisy place for long time, this HX1 will be your choice (providing your budget allows - the price seems to be vary greatly among different countries, as we heard the retail price in mainland China for HX1 is double that than in Hong Kong). Normal users can buy a headset paying a less prohibitive price.

Caution when buying
Interested users have to notice that the headset's voice instruction has different languages but should be not changeable. So if you buy in mainland China, you get Mandarin voice instruction, if you buy in Hong Kong, you get English.

^ Side note: 明 means bright, 清 means clear, but 清明 is the Ching Ming festival, the grave-sweeping festival (wiki here))

Lenovo to honor 87% discount mis-pricing of desktop computer

Late last month, precisely 2PM HKT 27 October 2009, the Hong Kong section of the Lenovo website had a minor error, the prices were incredibly low. The license alone of the newly launched Windows 7 Premium 32 is believed to be more expensive than the whole machine. It was believed that Lenovo had some minor problem distinguishing between Hong Kong dollars and US dollars. (Pic: click to enlarge)

The news spread fast among forums. Users from some local forums like HKGolden and HKEPC attempted to order multiple machines. It was believed that more than 100 machines were ordered within the short period of time.

Initially, those smart customers were not hoping to get a successful order, since not long ago, Dell Hong Kong made similar mistakes and was shamelessly voided affected orders with no compensation whatsoever (whereas Taiwanese users get a 20%-off coupon in a case where discount and price interchanged).

Affected customers were contacted by Lenovo from 30 October, confirming that their order are honored provided that a supplementary Non-Reselling Contract was to be signed. As of today, the order are being processed (and some buyers are blantantly reselling the machines in smaller local forum)(links deliberately not given)(good luck to them).