Nokia Essence (BH-610) Review

If you enjoy listening music on the move and its quality is particularly important to you, you might be disappointed from the headset that your phone manufacturer has added. And there is nothing unusual, since almost always it is a cheap headset that can not provide the same sound as their more expensive counterparts, which are sold separately. And if you keep the wireless and sound, disappointment will be complete, since the sale along with stereo Bluetooth headsetis extremely rare. Fortunately, the market for mobile accessories has something to offer and it can be found very interesting proposals. Nokia Essence is precisely that.

Apparatus and management
This is a new series of device accessories company that exploits the advantages of contactless technology, NFC. For her, usually talking on mobile payments, but until they become a mass phenomenon, will have to wait a lot and at first to gain a critical mass of phones equipped with similar capabilities. The market now appears more and more devices such chips and manufacturers invent new ways to use them until it came time to start paying with their phones. One of them stakes and Nokia to their new accessories. They NFC serves to initiate and implement a Bluetooth connection just by touching the two devices, which is extremely comfortable and really saves time, as we managed to convince themselves. Of course, this also applies if you have NFC phone as Nokia C7, Oro, N9, 701, 700, 603 and 808 PureView, but otherwise you need to use traditional methods of connection. Of course, the widget works with virtually all Bluetooth devices – phones, music players, laptops, portable game consoles. We tested the NFC capabilities of N9 and found that tapping the phone handset not only includes but also activates its Bluetooth capabilities, if it were excluded. Second touch disconnects.

Nokia Essence is a stereo Bluetooth headset that you can wear pinned to your clothing or hung around your neck. For the latter included a special rubber band to which you can fix the cable if you want to wear a widget like this. The kit is still carrying case and silicone seals in 6 sizes, so you can pick one that fits you best. Added is a standard Nokia phone charger. The main task of streaming music and making calls is performed by a small black unit with dimensions 58.9 x 31.6 x 15.7 mm and weighing 32 grams. On it are placed buttons for call management, playback and volume, but there are still three more special. Two of them serve to add more low (bass) or high frequencies, and the third is intended to enable technology for active noise suppression. She is most proud of the headset as it allows to eliminate 99.8% of ambient noise in the low band – bass.

Display and interface
In turn, silicone seals deal with most of the noise in the mid and high frequencies. Adding 10.3 mm speakers (frequency range 6-20000 Hz, Impedance 32 ohm) in the headphones, the result is a surprisingly rich sound and powerful bass and clear mid and high frequencies even the loudest place. For example, in road traffic noise is very low frequencies are filtered out much better than the technology. According to specification the active reduction of ambient noise decreases by up to 21dB, and the total reduction, taking into account the silicone seals to be 30dB. Of course, except for listening to music, Nokia Essence is to hold talks in microphone that attaches to the right earphone cord. Sound quality is very good and in this respect have no comments. The company says the battery takes eight hours listening to music or conversations, and our tests reached the time of independence.

Technology to actively reduce background noise works by using data from additional microphone analyze surrounding sounds and generate the same sound wave amplitude but opposite. It is mixed with the sound of the phone and suppress noises that would otherwise reach the ear. The effectiveness of this depends on the quality of the microphone, the speed of electronics, which processes the signal and filtering algorithms. In Nokia Essence they all seem to work very well. In fact, do not expect full filtering ambient noise, especially if they have a higher frequency but lower disappear almost entirely.

Multimedia games and applications
The handset has 4 user’s work, which Nokia describes as follows. The standard provides the sound of a concert hall, the second is activating additional bass is activated in the third increase in high frequencies, which the company compared with the music of electrostatic speakers, and the latter is included in the bass and treble sound by providing reference audio system with subwoofer. In addition, Nokia Essence supports various audio codecs for music transfer with minimal loss of quality – these include SBC, apt-X and AAC Direct Streaming.