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A Bluetooth headset costing $380? Made of platinum??

It's billed as a Skype headset: a Bluetooth earpiece, with boom microphone, to stop Skype voice calls getting you in a tangle when you stand up. Also, it's expensive; the Plantronics CS60 USB.

To be honest, the prototype device, when we played with it last year, didn't impress. It was costly, and uncomfortable.

It turned out to have three options for clipping to the head, none of which seemed comfortable or secure. More to the point, it was yet another USB device to connect to your PC.

The problem was: you could easily connect a perfectly standard Bluetooth device - like the one you use for your mobile phone every day - to a PC using a perfectly standard Bluetooth adapter such as the Linksys Bluetooth dongle.

This works. It also lets you connect your mobile Bluetooth phone to your PC if you want to use it as a modem, and it can be pretty cheap.

Now, Red Ferret has got hold of "the first VoIP wireless headset" for a review, and stunned us here by revealing a $380 price tag.

Highlight of the review: "The big hassle is the fact that you can only accept and end calls with the single button, so if you want to make a new call from the garden you have to trudge back to the computer and use Skype on screen to do the deed."

It's not just making and ending calls; it's punching in "press pound for options" or "press 1 for access to your bank account" that makes the single button useless. In fact, there are DECT solutions for Skype anyway, and there are also PocketPC devices which use WiFi for Skype, like the Magician or Universal from iMate.

This (notes the reviewer) "is where alternative solutions like the Sipura SPA 2000 box and a conventional DECT wireless phone work better as a general home based VoIP system, even though it’s SIP only and can’t access the awesomely cheap Skype."

In fact, all Plantronics has to do is put a perfectly ordinary dialpad - with Bluetooth if you like! into the box, so you can produce DTMF tones.

For the money, it's really hard to see why they don't. And for the money, it would be nice to be able to use the Bluetooth dongle for other devices - like your mobile phone.

My impressions: it's nice to have the Bluetooth headset with its own auto-charge docking station. Not much else is nice, though.