Arctic Sound P311 Bluetooth Headset Review

The Headset

Arctic has opted for a neckband design for the P311 which is perfect for the target market of smartphone and laptop users. Even though the sizable case is less than perfect for those on the move, the headset itself folds up into a very compact form which is ideal for travelling.

There are a number of buttons situated on the right-hand earpiece which let you control the various functions of the headset. The large button in the centre of the earpiece has a number of different functions. It can be used to activate the hands-free headset functionality, letting you make, answer, end and refuse calls, redial the last dialled number and switch the call between phone and headset. During music playback, it can be used to play, pause or stop music and also acts as the on/off button of the headset.

We can’t help feeling there are too many functions on this button and learning how long to hold it for each function from the manual would take quite a while. But thankfully, the other four buttons on the headset only have one function each; the top two allow you to control volume and the bottom two let you skip between tracks.

On the periphery of the earpiece we find the inbuilt microphone which is very small in size. This is perfectly adequate for hands-free calling or for Skype even though the sound quality produced isn’t exactly studio grade.

The plastics used in construction are of an acceptable quality considering the price of the headset but the P311 doesn’t have that ‘built to last forever’ feeling of SteelSeries’ headsets. The area in which the lack of refinement is most noticeable is the action and feel of the buttons; they are very noisy in operation and don’t feel securely attached.

Even though Arctic have shoehorned in a 400mAH Li-Polymer battery, the P311 remains relatively compact and lightweight. Unfortunately we didn’t have enough time to test out Arctic’s battery claims of 20 hours of music playback but we’ve had nearly 10 hours of use out of them during our tests and they haven’t run out yet!