Clear One Chat 50 Speaker Phone
The Chat 50 from ClearOne is your all in one personal speaker phone for PC’s, cell and regular phones as well as being a regular single channel speaker.
Ease of Use, Performance: 23/25, Look & Feel: 23/25,
Features 24/25, How much I enjoy 20/25
Total: 90/100
It’s kind of hard to get excited about a personal speaker phone but the Chat 50 from ClearOne is a great speaker phone for PC and regular phone use. The Chat 50 connects to a PC and with some software it controls and helps tune the sound and voice through the computer. Each device scheme you may want to use is part of the control program so you can simply and quickly change from VOIP and gaming to telephone for an important video conference.
The Chat 50 works through a computer and kind of needs one to regulate the echo cancellation and full duplex ability of this little speaker system. You can use it without a PC but results will vary as I can tell you, one cell phone I have sounds like you’re talking through a can and the other sounds just fine. The second cell phone just connected to the 2.5 mm jack and worked perfectly as well as my wireless home phone.
The Chat 50 comes with the speaker phone system base that has the single speaker and microphone on it, power cord/adapter, USB cable, manual, CD with drivers and other information, the 2.5 mm to 3.5mm cable for connecting to telephones, cell phones and MP3 players. The power adapter has a removable prong set so you can purchase separate prongs for other countries.
The Chat 50 is very easy to set up; simply insert the CD into your computer and load the drivers, then click on Device Setup on the main page to install the various devices you can use like cell phones or the XBox 360. Each section for the devices has the generic brand as well as some popular brand names listed. You can check the ClearOne website if you have a particular cell or regular home phone, conference phone or even program like Skype or TeamSpeak you would like to use with the Chat 50.