Arctic Sound P311 Bluetooth Headset Review

Comfort and Performance
One of the most important factors to consider when buying a headset is comfort. The Arctic P321 excels in this area, in part a result of its extremely lightweight design. The earpieces feature faux leather earpads which grip your ears with enough force to secure the headset but without causing discomfort.

The headset remains securely in place when walking around and only moves a little when running so the P311 is perfect for people who are out and about. We did find the faux leather earpieces became a little uncomfortable during our running tests as they make your ears sweat more than usual!

We tested the headset with our trusty Macbook Pro to see how it coped with music playback, movie playback and Skype. After we had paired the devices, we were presented with a notification asking if we would like to use the headset for audio playback. We promptly agreed and began our testing.

Imagine our surprise when we loaded up iTunes and were greeted by some of the most distorted, poor quality playback we’ve ever experienced. It would seem that the headset, by default, enters mono mode which must be used when you’re using the inbuilt microphone. Switching to the stereo ‘headphone’ profile in the sound preferences tab rectified this.

With the settings all sorted, we loaded up iTunes once more. Thankfully the sound quality was much improved with clear high tones and reasonably prominent bass notes. The lower registers did seem to distort slightly in some tracks, though, and occasionally lacked presence. The movie playback experience wasn’t exactly immersive but was perfectly acceptable for watching a movie on the go.

We then tested the P311 with our HTC Desire (Android) smartphone. Fortunately, the setup process was much more simple than with our Macbook as all the settings were configured automatically. The Music playback experience was pretty much identical to what we heard with the Macbook and the hands-free functions all worked perfectly. There were a couple of instances when first testing with the HTC Desire where the music stuttered a little but this quickly stopped and the headset was fine for the rest of the test. This said, we couldn’t use the hands-free functions without the idiot sheet in front of us as the different button functions would take a while to learn.