While I have been looking at high-end earbuds and headphones for personal use, there’s a huge market for business devices. EPOS offerings cover this market and I had a chance to look at their EPOS Adapt 260, a double-sided Bluetooth headset with a USB dongle.
The first thing to note is how light and small these are. At only 120g and with very comfortable pads, you can go on a long way wearing these headsets.
Using these headsets with your computer is pretty simple. They come with a pre-paired USB adapter, which ensured they are ready to use out-of-the-box. The same USB adapter has a LED that will pulse purple if there’s a Microsoft Teams message such as a meeting join notification or missed call notification.
You can pair the EPOS Adapt 260 with your laptop’s Bluetooth but then you won’t have access to the in-built Teams functionality. A purple button on the headset gives you instant access to some Teams functionality. For example, you can click the button once to open Teams or click it to join an online meeting. The same purple button can be used to accept or reject voice calls if the headset is also paired to a phone.
The power button doubles as a mute button, while a slider button controls volume up and down but can also be pressed to play/pause and control the previous/next track when listening to music.
The controls are very simple and in line with other headphones. What I missed here was the ability to mute yourself by lifting the mic arm. The mic arm contains a noise-cancelling microphone so other people in your meeting can hear your voice clearly while the headset filters out ambient noise around you.
The EPOS Adapt 260 is branded as EPOS | Sennheiser, and it shows its Sennheiser heritage in sound quality. While it doesn't have a noise-cancellation function, the sound is still really good, covering the whole 20–20,000 Hz range. Listening to music while working is actually somewhat enjoyable with these headsets – thanks to the adjustable cup position and lightweight, padded headband.
It supports Bluetooth multipoint, which means it can be paired to multiple devices and connected to two devices at the same time. You can have it connected to both your laptop and phone and it will switch to the appropriate source as needed – for your music or voice call on the phone, then switching to a Teams meeting on your laptop and back when the meeting is finished.
All this works transparently and really well.
You should also download the EPOS Connect application to control your headset. It allows you to change settings as well as update its firmware (I had one firmware update for the headset and one for the wireless USB adapter since installing those). For those large deployments, where your company has a number of those headsets there’s an option to install the EPOS Manager, a central management tool for all the headsets in the business. This is based on Docker containers running on Windows Server. I did not test this option though.
Battery life is rated at 27 hours and truth be told I haven’t used it enough to get to the recharge point yet. If you double-click the power button a voice prompt will tell you the current battery levels. Recharge is simple, using a standard USB-C cable.
I’ve noticed how fast the start time is for these headsets. I had times when someone would call me via Teams and I would push the power button, wait for one ring and be connected, ensuring I could use it even for ad-hoc calls.
The EPOS Adapt 260 is available in New Zealand now.
