Plantronics Savi Go on Mac OS X

Being a remote freelancer, I regularly take part in Skype and phone calls. Up until now, I’ve been using the internal microphone of my MacBook Pro, but let’s be honest, that sucks. So I went hunting for a headset to use.

I ended up buying the Plantronics Savi Go WG100. So far, it seems like a pretty good headset, but getting it to work with my Mac running Snow Leopard proved to be harder than I’d have liked.

Primarily because I thought I knew what I was doing.

It’s there for a reason

The headset comes with a USBBluetooth dongle. That’s nice, I thought, especially for those poor computers that don’t already have Bluetooth built in. Luckily, MacBook Pros do, so I went ahead and paired the headset with the laptop. It worked fine and the headset was found and set up as audio input/output no problem.

Oh, you wanted audio in your headset?

Until I tried to actually use the headset, that is. No audio was sent to or from the headset, and audio applications like iTunes would just hang when I tried to play something.

I had almost wrapped up the headset and sent it back when I figured I’d try the Bluetooth dongle. Lo and behold, it worked flawlessly with the dongle.

How to get it running

So here are a few notes for anyone else having issues with the Plantronics Savi Go WG100/B on OS X 10.6:

• Don’t use the builtin Bluetooth for connecting the headset, use the accompanying Bluetooth dongle. You can turn the internal Bluetooth off entirely, and probably should to avoid pairing with that.
• Pairing the dongle with the headset can take a very, very long time (I am talking several minutes here). Don’t get impatient and abort.
• Oh yeah, and remember to hit the answer button on the headset to actually turn the headset on and put it in speech mode when testing… ::cough::

And all this because I thought I knew what I was doing. Next time I’ll read the effin manual… or not.

Update december 7, 2011

It seems that at least on Mac OS X Snow Leopard 10.6.8 it is possible to pair directly with the Mac - ie not using the BUA200 Bluetooth dongle. My dongle suddenly lost pairing with the headset, and when I tried pairing with regular Bluetooth it worked just fine and I’ve even managed a Skype call using it.

So there is that.

Comments and Trackbacks

Any idea why using the MacBook Pro Bluetooth didn't work?
Maybe you were "holding it wrong"? ;-)

Ba-dum ching! ;)

Beats me. I am guessing the answers lies somewhere in between 6 or 7 different versions of Bluetooth and what profiles are shipped with the OS.

I've tried a Savi Go WG101/B and hey, this one is totally screwed up when comes to OS X.

Even with the included bluetooth dongle the pairing isn't reliable. After the first successful pairing I pulled the dongle out of my MacBook Pro and tried to reconnect it, but the pairing was lost. Manual re-pairing isn't possible at all.

Connected to a Windows7 VM running within Parallels on the same MBP, the headset pairs without any problem and is fully functional.

From my experience, better keep your hands away from this if your on OS X...

Cheers,
Dirk