Turtle Beach's Xbox 360 Bluetooth Chat Adapter hands-on

Over five years ago, I wrote a post on this very website about one enterprising Xbox 360 owner who velcroed a Jabra A210 Bluetooth adapter to the back of his controller, thereby freeing him from the tyranny of a wired headset. Back then, in the early days of the Xbox 360, some months before Microsoft introduced its own (terrible) wireless headset and before the PS3 was released with built-in Bluetooth headset support, this hack seemed all but guaranteed to make it mainstream. Of course, it hasn't.

Now, over five years later, when the people at Turtle Beach tell me they have something they're pretty sure I'm going to like, I make my way to their E3 booth in the very last hours of the last day of the show and they hand over one of eight prototype Xbox 360 Bluetooth Chat Adapters.

Included as part of its new XP500 headset – an Xbox-ification of last year's excellent PS3-flavored PX5s – this Chat Adapter aims to keep the XP500s totally wireless. If you wanted to use the PX5's microphone with an Xbox 360, it meant tethering it to a controller with a cable. If you wanted to go completely wireless, it meant picking up one of Microsoft's notoriously shoddy wireless headsets, which use a proprietary radio connection, similar to the console's controllers, to connect to the Xbox.

http://www.joystiq.com/2011/07/07/tu...nds-on-or-one/