REVIEW: Voyager Pro UC enables PC, cell phone
communications with one Bluetooth headset
Plantronics system
does double duty
The Voyager Pro UC comes with a pre- paired Bluetooth dongle for use with supported Windows PC softphones. The arpiece can also pair with a cell phone, allowing the user to move seamlessly between devices.
By Andrew Garcia
The Plantronics Voyager Pro UC provides heavy callers with an excellent way to utilize the same Bluetooth
headset for both cell phone- and
PC-based unified communications systems.
This can free mobile
users from juggling
multiple headsets,
while delivering excellent voice quality and
distance performance
along with reasonable
battery life.
I tested the Voyager Pro
UC WG200/B, which comes
with an earpiece and a pre-paired
Bluetooth dongle for $199. It is
designed to work jointly with a
Bluetooth 2.0-enabled cell phon e
or
smartphone plus a Windows-based
PC softphone via the dongle. This
allowed me during tests to seam -
lessly use the same headset with
both communications systems.
Plantronics also offers the
WG201/B for use with Microsoft
Office Communications Server systems. This iteration comes with the
“Optimized for Microsoft Office
Communicator” wordmark promising performance and ease of installation.
The Voyager Pro UC is certainly
not the smallest or sexiest Blue-
tooth headset around. Indeed, at
just under 11 cm in length and
weighing 17. 5 grams, the device is
larger than many competing con-
sumer headsets. However, the extra
length gets the microphone boom
close enough to the mouth to
provide excellent voice
pickup, making the
larger size worth the
trade-off.
The earpiece part
of the Voyager Pro
UC has four but -
tons: a power/
pairing button and a pair of volume controls (that when pressed at
the same time will mute the microphone) along the spine, and a call
control button at the base of the
microphone.
With the call control button,
The Voyager Pro UC is rated to
work with many major unified com-
munication softphones, including
those from Avaya, Cisco Systems,
IBM and Microsoft. When it comes
to consumer communications sys-
tems, the Voyager Pro UC works
with Skype (which I used for the
bulk of my testing) and Google
Talk.
PC users can also listen to music
using the Voyager Pro UC. If a sup -
ported media player is being used
(Apple i Tunes or Windows Media
Center, for instance), music play -
back will automatically pause when
a call to the softphone is answered
(although not when a call to the cell
phone is answered).
The Voyager Pro UC will pair
with a Bluetooth radio
already in a laptop,
but for performance,
quality, ease of deploy -
ment and additional
features, Plantronics
recommends using the
earpiece in conjunc -
tion with the pre-paired
The PerSono software is not
strictly necessary, but it enables
call control capability directly
from the headset with supported
softphones. The Voyager Pro UC
