The Plantronics Discovery 925 is an attractive Bluetooth headset that doesn't sacrifice performance for style. It combines one of our favorite features, a boom microphone, with an attractive and lightweight design and approaches (but doesn't quite match) our Editors' Choice headsets on sound quality.

The Discovery 925 has a neat look. It's a long, narrow triangle that's hollow in the middle, with a diamond-shaped piece that goes in your ear. The headset comes in black, pink, and gold and feels like ceramic. It's actually plastic--and very light at 0.3 ounces. There's one button on the outside, which turns the device on and off, dials or releases calls, triggers voice dialing, or kicks the headset into pairing mode. A second button on the underside cycles through three volume levels. The headset flashes only when you turn it on or off, or when it's in pairing mode. An added bonus: Plantronics has replaced its proprietary charger connector with a more universal Micro USB one.

You pop the headset into your ear with one of three included ear gels. Each one has a stabilizing loop that makes it relatively tight and comfortable. The 1.9-inch boom brings the microphone closer to your mouth, to reduce background noise and improve voice quality.

I had no trouble pairing the headset with a number of devices, including a Motorola Motorola RAZR² V9, an Apple iPhone, an old Motorola E815, an LG Voyager, and a Verizon SMT5800. It doesn't support auto-pairing, but that's still a relatively rare option in Bluetooth headsets. While one side of the boom is the microphone, the other side is the headset's antenna. The earpiece started popping and clicking about 15 feet away from our RAZR2 V9, with voices tolerable to about 30 feet.

The Discovery 925 achieved 4 hours 3 minutes of battery life on my tests, but you'll get a significant boost if you stow the headset in its handy charging case; it houses an additional battery, which provides up to an additional 5 hours of talk time.

Voice quality was good, but not quite up to the standards of our less-expensive Editors' Choice devices, the $100 Plantronics Voyager 520 or the $130 Aliph Jawbone. During my tests, volume in the Discovery 925's earpiece adapted to background noise levels, getting louder outdoors. Transmissions also sounded good and solid. But wind noise was a problem, just as it was on the Voyager 520. Overall, voices on the Voyager 520 sounded slightly clearer than on the Discovery 925—but the difference was subtle.

Interference is a bit of an issue with the Discovery 925. In an area with more than a dozen Wi-Fi networks and a number of Bluetooth devices, I heard a considerable amount of popping and clicking in the earpiece. The Voyager 520 fared better under these circumstances. And while no headset can block music, say, in a noisy situation with heavy metal blaring, the Voyager 520 was better at picking out the headset wearer's voice than the Discovery 925.

While the Plantronics 925 is not quite Editors' Choice–worthy, it is a decent-sounding, unusual, interesting-looking headset. Whether you're willing to cough up $150 for its unconventional design is up to you, but its performance shouldn't stop you.

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