My First Tweet-Up & The Plantronics Voyager Legend

This past week I’ve been travelling with a new Plantronics Voyager Legend Bluetooth headset. This is the fourth headset in the Voyager range that I’ve used. You may recall that not so long ago I bought a Voyager Pro HD. That headset has been completely satisfactory. I was not intending to purchase a replacement. So it is that I’ll start by describing how I came to have this little beasty, which is a bit of a curious story and the tale of my first Tweet-Up, aka Twitter Party.

Back in October my wife took a business trip to Anaheim CA for a few days. This was something of a turning of the tables for I am the frequent business traveller in the family. She rarely travels on business.

It was decided (i.e. I was told) that since she had to be away I would need to be taking care of things at home that week. I found myself tending the homestead without some of the normal distractions of our daily life. I had some extra time to tinker for a few evenings.

One day that week I got wind of a “Tweet-Up” revolving around a new Plantronics headset. Apparently the Plantronics marketing team had created some kind of social media outreach. They had a few bloggers (here, here & here) promoting this event as a few hours of Twitter activity about a new headset, it’s properties, use cases, etc. I’d not experienced a Tweet-Up so I thought it potentially interesting.

Unlike some of the Deep Geek things that I do, this was to be a more general online public gathering. It would be less about what my wife once called, “blah, blah, blah, megabytes” and more about average people finding out about real-world features and benefits. I thought it could perhaps broaden my scope and help me understand how the less techno-obsessive deal with such gadgets.

I must admit that I was was a little incredulous. The one prior time that I’d heard of a similar event was an online wine tasting conducted via Twitter. That I found to be perplexing. I could not see the benefit of using Twitter as an avenue to connect people taking part in such a deep sensory experience. I didn’t understand the benefit to the participants. It seemed to too disengaged for that type of activity.

However, I accept that my initial view may have been too narrow. Perhaps a Tweet-Up could be more connective than I thought? So at the appointed time, on the appointed day, I sat down to TweetDeck and searched for the #SmarterWorking hash tag to join in the flow of the Plantronics Twitter-verse.

I found the event to be friendly and cordial. As the tweets flowed I found that I could add some detail based upon my use of the Voyager Pro UC and Voyager Pro HD for the past two years.

While the obvious use case was with a mobile phone, I was able to point out some uncommon use cases that highlighted the flexibility of the devices. Voyager Pro with Skype , Google Chat or Hangouts? Sure thing. Voyager Pro with Polycom VVX anyone? Oh, yeah!

I was also able to put some focus on the HDVoice aspect of things.  You didn’t think that I, of all people, could let that slide, did you?

I tried not to deep dive into too much spec-quoting-geeky-minutia or otherwise commandeer the flow.

For my part, I gained some sense of what concerns Joe & Josephine Q Public about such gadgetry. The event seemed to be well received.

At the end of the event the hosts announced that everyone who had registered for the event in advance, participated, and stayed to the end would receive a free Voyager Legend headset from Plantronics. “Sweet,” thought I, even though I really didn’t need another new headset.

The event passed, and eventually passed from memory. That is, until last Monday when Fedex delivered a box containing the promised Voyager Legend. I’ll have something to say about that device another time. For now you might have a look at what friend and Blogalyst Dave Michels had to say about the Voyager Legend.