PCWorld march 2007 reviews some headphones which can be switched from streaming music from laptop to answering phones from a mobile.
It sounds cumbersome lugging around a laptop to play music, when modern mobiles both stream music from broadband internet (next G) and have inbuilt music players (mine has a 1GB mini SD and the player plays MP3, WMA, MID,and WAV.). The supplied wired stereo ear piece comes with a control button to stop and start play and switch between phone and player (when the phone rings while playing music the player pauses, press the button to answer the phone, press to end and to restart the player).
This is very nice, with good sound but cumbersome to hook up the wires when getting in and out of the car while "on call" (and needing to answer the phone hands free while driving). To get a hands free phone answering device in 2 cars (or a friends car) I bought a bluetooth earpiece-a much better solution than an in car wired hands free kit as Ihave 2 cars and often travel in others cars and drive for them.
Unfortunately this bluetooth ear piece only answers the phone-it does not receive from the media player. On enquiry at the store I was informed they dont have any and doubt that anyone makes a bluetooth earpice that does both.
I cannot understand this as I thought if the phone is wirelessly enabled it could stream anything over blue tooth. One can copy files to computer via bluetooth apparently.(why bother-I watched a friend take 10 minutes to transfer 3 photos, to transfer podcasts from computer to phone with the supplied cable is very slow-slower than usb 1.1, much quicker to put the mini sd card in its adapter and use the computers sd card reader and transfer at usb 2 speed).
Is there a (small) bluetooth earpiece that both answers the phone and receives from the mediaplayers in phones? (I believe there is a "headphone" type device that does it but I'm not walking around and driving wearing one of those! The bluetooth thingy is funny looking enough and gets its share of comments "whats growing out of your ear?")
I have the telstra next G ZTE F850, and a motorola blutooth H350
