Category: Product Reviews

I pur­chased the LG TONE INFINIM Blue­tooth Stereo Head­set on Ama­zon to use with my iPhone 6+. I was so excit­ed! From the reviews and descrip­tion, it sound­ed like exact­ly what I want­ed for lis­ten­ing to music while work­ing out and still being able to take calls.

When I got it, I imme­di­ate­ly paired it up and could hear my music with beau­ti­ful clar­i­ty. Great bal­ance, nice highs and lows. I hate most ear­buds, but these fit in my ears very well. There was just one prob­lem — I could­n’t hear any­one on phone calls, and callers could­n’t hear me. Hmm.

Think­ing it was a prob­lem with the head­set, I exchanged it. Ama­zon is great about that kind of thing, you know? I got the new one, paired it, test­ed it — and had the same problem. 

So I test­ed this one with the boyfriend’s (Android) phone — it worked just fine. I erased my phone com­plete­ly and set it up as new, and still had the same prob­lem. I sought advice from co-work­ers (I mean, come on, I do work for Apple) and checked out all the sug­ges­tions. No joy. I Googled and could find noth­ing about prob­lems between this head­set and iPhones. In fact, there were reports of it work­ing nice­ly with the 5 and 5s models.

I went to the Apple store and they swapped out my phone. Same prob­lem. Then we got the bright idea to try the head­set with the tech’s iPhone 6, and found that we could­n’t hear calls on it, either.

Final­ly I did what I should have done orig­i­nal­ly, and called LG. After final­ly get­ting the idea across to a man who did­n’t have a firm grasp of the Eng­lish lan­guage, and did­n’t even ask what mod­el iPhone I was using, or what ver­sion of iOS it was run­ning. He just put me on hold and went away for a bit, then come back and said, “The HBS-900 is not com­pat­i­ble with iPhone.” 

I said, “With any iPhone, or just my iPhone?”

“We have not test­ed with lat­est,” he said. “You have lat­est, yes?”

“Yes, the iPhone 6+ run­ning iOS 8.4,” I replied.

“We have not test­ed,” he said again.

Now that seems a major over­sight on LG’s part, and while the prod­uct descrip­tion men­tions an Android app for easy pair­ing, it also says there’s a man­u­al pair­ing mode (which I used) for oth­er devices. That’s noth­ing like say­ing, “This won’t work with iPhones” and it is mis­lead­ing mar­ket­ing. I am very unhap­py that LG has over­looked such a huge mar­ket seg­ment with this poor deci­sion, and that I have wast­ed so much time on this thing as a result. I’ve had decent expe­ri­ences with LG prod­ucts in the past, but I’ll think twice before buy­ing any­thing from them in the future.