Sports Headband with built-in speakers

Harrogate, July 2015

My mobile contract is with EE, and not long ago they notified all their customers about a free offer of a 'Power Bar'. This turned out to be about the size and heft of two of those large torch batteries, with two sockets on one end and a short cable. The idea is that you charge it up by connecting the cable between a USB port (e.g. computer) and one of the Power Bar sockets, and then if your mobile phone runs out of juice when you're out and about, you turn the cable round and charge the phone from the Power Bar. The other part of the offer was that if you were in town and your Power Bar wasn't charged up, you could take it into an EE shop and simply swap it for one that was. All for free. It seemed too good to be true.

So I went and got one, and even used it once, and then it wouldn't hold its charge any more. So I popped into an EE shop and tried to swap it for a new one, but they told me that the scheme was on hold because of a problem with overheating. True, the gadget did get very hot when it was working. They expected to be able to re-start the scheme once the problem had been fixed.

It clearly wasn't fixable, because the next thing was that the Power Bars were being recalled, and what's more they were prepared to give us all a £20 credit to spend on EE accessories online if we brought our Power Bars back to the shop and handed them in. So that's what I did next, not knowing what I would do with the £20. Back home I browsed the online shop, and was thinking about getting a better cover for my phone when I saw the Sports Headband with built-in speakers for your mobile device. And then I saw a Sports Headband with wireless bluetooth capability as well as built-in speakers for your mobile device, so I could listen to music on my phone while it's in my pocket rather than trailing a wire through my clothing.

I dithered somewhat about which option to go for before deciding on the wireless bluetooth one, and only after I'd placed the order did I remember that my iPod doesn't have bluetooth, so I'd only be able to listen to media via my phone, which has only a fraction of the music and books that are on my iPod. Never mind, it's only for my running a couple of times a week, although because of all the badminton I haven't done any running for a while.

On Tuesday I spent a hour at the Snowdome to remind myself how to ski. It was the perfect opportunity to road test the headband, and it worked a treat - except for the fact that the Snowdome wireless connection wasn't reliable enough to stream music from the Internet so I had to rely on either my downloaded tracks or use some of my data package. But it was still good, and the skiing went very well too. When I got home I managed to buy travel insurance and some Bulgarian currency, so now I'm all set and looking forward to the forthcoming ski trip.