As I packed for my travel to IT Expo early tomorrow morning, I was again annoyed that I still haven’t found a great headset (with microphone) for travelling.  A little bit ago, I bought the Logitech “Premium Notebook Headset” which is in fact a very nice headset.  Audio sounds great, fits well, works great with all the various VoIP softphones  I use… I have no real complaints about how it functions.  I bought it in part because it folds flat and has a nice hardshell case.  But it has a problem – it’s still too darn big! 

I never check bags when on business travel.  I have my “roller” travel luggage and then my laptop bag on top of that.  Space is at an absolute premium. And given that I cram a lot of equipment into my laptop bag, having a small but hard plastic case is really critical. (As previous (destroyed!) headsets without cases will attest!) An example that works is my wonderful Sennheiser PCX 100 headphones that fold up into this nice little hard case that is about 5.5 inches long, 3 inches wide and 1 inch deep. Fantastic! (Curiously, though, Sennheiser doesn’t seem to make them anymore.)  If I could get a set like that with a microphone, I’d be all set.

Now, yes, I could go very small with a Bluetooth headset, but I have two problems: 1) my current laptop doesn’t have Bluetooth built in, so I have to use an adapter, and the one I have doesn’t always seem to work; and 2) my experience with Bluetooth so far is that it really eats up the batteries on devices like headsets.  I don’t want to be at an airport or hotel trying to have a VoIP call and discover that my headset needs a recharge.  I just want to keep it simple… give me wires!

So that’s my question for any readers out there… do you have any suggestions for headsets that have worked well for you in travel?  (Thanks in advance)