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.