Design

The review sample of the Sudio Vogue Bluetooth Handsfree Speakerphone that landed at CNET Australia can be neatly summed up in one word — pink.

Exceptionally pink in fact. It's an arresting colour choice, and it's only fair to note that less attention-seeking buyers could also opt to purchase this particular Bluetooth Speakerphone in blue, white or black if they so wished. Aside from the vibrant colour, the other thing that makes the Sudio Vogue stand out is its elongated length. Perhaps we're showing our age, but we couldn't help but think it looked rather like an 80's era cheap AM radio, an observation that would shortly come back to haunt us.

Features

The Sudio Vogue is a Bluetooth 2.0 compliant speakerphone powered by a 650mAh Lithium Polymer battery that Sudio claims will give up to 10 hours talk time and 480 hours of standby time. Controls are simple enough, with a large call/finish button, smaller volume buttons and a speakerphone mute button comprising your lot. The Vogue kit comes with an in-car charger and mini USB cable, as well as a very lightweight clip for attaching it to your car's sun visor.

Performance

The Vogue has a rather bold claim in its marketing material, namely that there's "no installation or hard wiring required". We get the hard wiring bit well enough, but that's just a function of it being Bluetooth, after all. The no installation part left us perplexed, until we realised that it falls into that category of claims that can be broadly interpreted as "a lie". Just like every other Bluetooth speakerphone on the market, you've got to go through a standard pairing process when first powering the Vogue up. It's as painless as any other speakerphone you might think of, but it's a stretch to say that this involves "no installation".

Unless the company meant physical installation, as it's a portable unit, but even that claim falls a little flat. You've got to force the clip onto the back of the Vogue, and in our testing we found it on the weak side. It's good that you can clip it facing either side of the Vogue, as we suspect over time the metal is going to fatigue quickly, leaving you with a clip that's more of a hanger than an hanger-on.

Audio quality and pick-up on the Vogue was only average at quality, and the speakerphone is noticeably tinny and a bit quiet compared to most other speakerphones. Our initial assessment of the Vogue looking a bit like an AM radio came back to bite us because when we tested with some music files to really push the speaker's capabilities across a variety of tones, an AM radio was exactly what it sounded like, no matter which musical choice we made.

We were also somewhat worried by the fact that the Vogue's manual suggests that the way to disconnect the Vogue from your phone is to unpair it from the phone end. You can, as we found out, just power the Vogue down by holding the call button down for long enough. We did hit some problems with the Vogue pairing again with a phone after being powered down, and had to manually re-pair it a couple of times. The lights on the Vogue do make it quite clear when you've paired properly, but it's annoying to have to fiddle like this.