I love my little Bluetooth headset. It's a Plantronics Voyager 510, and does everything it's supposed to, including making me look busy and important. Or like a Borg.

It’s great not having the wire hanging out of my ear – it always got snagged on gearshifts and doorknobs – and the voice dialing is nifty. Then I got a new cell phone, a Motorola 360, which can play music. “Cool,” I thought. “I can listen to music or books, and calls will come through, too.” How naïve! The phone can be a music player, but it can't beam the music to the earpiece. Lame, right? Turns out Bluetooth is not as universal and seamless as it was hyped.

When I first heard of Bluetooth, it seemed like it would solve all my connectivity problems. The cable killer! No more wires! My "handsfree headset" cable carries music and phone calls to my ear, so Bluetooth should do that too.

Idiotically, it can’t.

This is because of ‘Bluetooth profiles’. When you pair two Bluetooth devices, they have to have matching profiles. Cell phones connect to hands-free devices through a profile called HFP, for Hands-Free Profile. This only includes enough bandwidth for lo-fi sound, good enough for phone calls. Higher quality sound, and stereo, require more bandwidth, and are enabled with the A2DP, for Advanced Audio Distribution Profile. Better sound, stereo, but no cell phone controls such as answering and voice dialing.

In come the new Bluetooth headsets. They are equipped with both the A2DP profile and HFP, and have microphones, so you can both listen to music and make phone calls. I got an IOGEAR headset, cleverly called the “Wireless Headphones for Stereo Device.” Shop around – you can find it for about $40.

So this solves the problem, right? Nah. Nothing in the land of Bluetooth is that simple.

First, your music player must now support A2DP. That leaves out any Palm device, like the Treo. It leaves out most cell phones, which still require you to use the stupid wire to listen to music. Some new ones do, but I don’t have one, and my cell phone contract doesn’t get me a new phone for another two years. And it obviously leaves out iPods, which don’t have Bluetooth at all.

I found two solutions, and more appear all the time. First, my IOGEAR headphones come with a transmitter, designed to attach to your iPod. Via cables that IOGEAR thoughtfully provides, you can also attach it to anything with a stereo miniplug, a cell phone 2.5mm plug or RCA plugs. Second, if you’re a Palm addict, as I am, there is an absolutely ingenious little bit of software called Softick Audio Gateway. It reroutes the audio output of the Palm from the earphone plug to the Bluetooth, and conforms to A2DP. If you have a Treo or a Palm, you should really check this company out.

This system, shockingly, works! I can carry my Palm TX in one pocket and my cell phone in another, listen to an audiobook on the Palm, and when a call comes in, I press the button on my ear and it switches to the phone. Quite amazing. It doesn’t do voice dialing, unfortunately, and the microphone is a bendy little boom-mike that you can unplug, when it should just be built into the earpiece. But still, it works.

Alas, I discovered that my ass is opaque to Bluetooth. I don’t know if this is a peculiarity of my ass, or common to all humanity. In any case, if I carry my Palm in my rear pocket, the sound drops out. My front pockets are full of keys and stuff, so I have had to resort to a belt clip. Yes, it looks impossibly dorky. Thank god I got married before my wife saw me like this.

Of course, now I'm not just a Borg, I'm a Borg that can’t hear too well, because both my ears are covered. My trusty Plantronics at least leaves one ear free to attend to the world around you – handy when the people behind me at Peet’s are yelling at you to get off the call and order your damn latté. And, you know, as cool as stereo is, creating that spatial illusion or whatever, with the whooshing sound in "Dark Side Of The Moon" going back and forth, it's really not absolutely necessary for my musical enjoyment, and completely unnecessary for listening to audiobooks.

My Big Wish is a Bluetooth headset that looks and functions just like my little Plantronics, hanging off of one ear with a discreet little microphone, but higher fidelity. It can be monaural, I don’t care. I want it equipped with A2DP, so I can listen to audiobooks and music, and switch effortlessly to phone calls.

I wonder what the Borg were listening to? Kraftwerk, definitely.

Peter Basch