The rubber “fingers” do a great job of keeping the AX Micro securely in place.

We hereby give you our permission—even encouragement—to wear a Bluetooth headset. As recently as a couple of years ago, hanging a plastic Star Trek–looking blinky-light device from one ear, just so you could walk around appearing to talk to yourself, well...it was kinda dorky. Not anymore.

Even so, we Mac users tend to give our gadgets style points, and the Tritton AX Micro is a good-looking device. We’d say it turns heads, but it really doesn’t, and therein lies its beauty—it’s so tiny and perches in your ear so effortlessly, it’s just not as noticeable as other BT headsets we’ve tried. There’s no hook to extend around your ear and get in the way of glasses and no pointy protrusion into your ear canal, either. The AX Micro comes with a rubber piece (in two sizes) featuring five flexible “fingers” that rest on the curved rim of your ear and just...stay there. We were dubious the Micro would stay in place, but it did—all day, even while running up the stairs. It’s light at 9.5 grams, comfortable, and shaped so it can fit in either ear.

Pairing it with an iPhone, Motorola RAZR, and a Mac was a breeze, and battery life lived up to the manufacturer’s estimates of up to 5 hours talk and 150 hours (around 6 days) of standby time. You have to charge it in its cradle, via either AC or USB.

Unfortunately, sound quality using Bluetooth 2.0 was only mediocre. Compared to the sound quality of speaking on an iPhone—or even using the iPhone’s included wired headset with microphone—our conversation partners complained that the AX Micro made us sound “muddy and mumbly,” and we had to repeat ourselves a lot. We could hear them just fine, though. When we used it with Skype, our friends reported a slight ding in quality compared to our MacBook Pro’s built-in microphone and speakers. We still had to speak up on our end, although the incoming audio sounded fine in the earpiece. The AX Micro worked well within 20 to 25 feet of the device it was paired with, and intermittently, with some clicking, for another 5 feet or so.