Finally got one of these this morning, used off ebay.
£45 including postage and in good nick - bargain I thought.
Been after one for awhile now the A2DP is working with 4.0727 firmware.
Good bits
- Sound - excellent. Deep bass, clear treble, amazing clarity.
- Bluetooth bit - easy to pair, fires up first time
- AVRC profile. Great - track switching, pausing, stopping - no problem
Not so good bits:
Audio:
- Skipping on start of new track. A second in, the audio stutters whether FFing to a new track or through natural progression.
- Track display. Sporadic. Seem to get an album's worth of ID3 track info then I lose it. Have to reset both phone and headset to get it to rework. The scrolling is a bit slow and blurry too. This is coincident but not always with the time loss.
- Time loss. The headset sometimes loses the time transmission. Only a reset of the phone cures it
- Audio loss. Sometimes you'll pause a track and then nothing will come back when restarting. Or it will burst out of the phone speakers. Or it will be very low out of the phone speakers.
RDS Radio:
- Haven't managed to pick up anything decent yet. Certainly no RDS display works yet the radio, when a station is found is very good.
SMS notifications:
- Doesn't work, but there is a disclaimer against this in the manual with only supported phones giving this functionality
Call taking/making:
- Works fine as per any bluetooth headset - clear, quality. Incoming number display works but Phone book cross-reference/Caller ID doesn't.
So all in all - Crushingly disappointed. I can't knock the audio - it's fantastic, but the niggles, hiccups and resets outweigh the great sound. I could maybe live with the odd headset reset (it's 0 - working in 9 seconds) but to keep rebooting the phone to get ID3 tag info is wholly unacceptably b0ll0cks.
What can I conclude from this? That the A2DP profile provided in the firmware can't handle such a sophisticated device? Originally Nokia said the HS-12W would only be compatible with the 8800. Is that because this was the first A2DP Nokia?
The latest 73 f/w has A2DP and AVRCP enabled so on paper this should be the ideal headset. Sadly in my limited experience with this phone it's proving far from the flagship bluetooth music solution Nokia are touting it as.
I'll have another play but so far it's not looking good.