Hi Folks - I have been trying out a couple of bluetooth headsets to find out the one that works best for me (without having to pay a fortune!).

I tried a plantronics explorer 320 and it worked well, except that the shop i bought charged an outrageous 100 bucks from me for that. So i returned and ordered one from ecost.com for 27 bucks. Got the product today - but it really looks fake !! the product finish is bad, and its blue in color (not the regular silver n black that i had seen earlier). I called plantronics helpdesk and the guy verified a date code (more like a batch number) and said they have made products with that batch. Not a convincing answer for me. Is there any way to identify if these are fake or real ? The product came in a cheap casing (not the plantronics box), with not all the manuals. Plantronics says they have products with blue finish !

Help me out guys ! Looking at the number of fake products available on ebay from china n hong kong, i think, i should better return this and get one from circuitcity instead !

If Plantronics themselves can't tell you to your satisfaction, I'm not sure how a poster here is going to provide you with a "convincing answer." Does it work satisfactorily? Are you happy with it? If so, keep it - if not, then return it and pay more for one locally.

I understand your point. Thanks for the reply.

The reason why it is not convincing to me is, they are not looking at any kind of serial number which should be unique per item. Any one can fake a batch number - right ?

I purchased a Motorola H500 from Tigerdirect that I suspect was fake, or at least refurbished by someone other than Motorola:

- The packaging was not sealed.
- The printed packaging inserts had washed out colours. The barcode on the back was very fuzzy and looked like it came off my old HP 4L laserjet.
- The documentation was obviously forged, with missing letters and poor formatting (page runoffs, etc).
- The manufacturing of the headset itself was poor quality - there were plastic burrs on all the edges.

I finally took my tigerdirect H500 to a local (reputable) dealer, and compared it against sealed-package H500. When comparing side-by-side the differences listed above really stood out, in addition to the following:

- the volume buttons on the Tigerdirect H500 were loose.
- the manufacturing stamp on the back on the H500 was very blurry on the tigerdirect unit, while the stamp on the dealer unit was crisp and easy to read.

Lastly, the sound quality of the Tigerdirect H500 was pretty bad - lots of static and very very poor outbound voice quality. I tried it paired with my 8700, my wives T610, and my laptop (with Skype) with the same poor performace with all pairings.

Hopefully you'll be able to look for some similar differences with your Plantronics to determine if it's legit or not...

My dad was gifted a Motorola BT headset last week. The accessory shattered (broke into two, parts ejected) when he pulled the Mini-B charging cable out to use it for the first time. This particular headset was a Made In China knockoff.