Installation, Testing and Comparison

I installed the Brando USB Bluetooth Chip (Ultra-slim) on my main system which run Windows XP64, and I had no problems. Included on the disc are drivers and Blue Soleil Bluetooth software, Blue Soleil is a very popular Bluetooth connection program that most companies use for their Bluetooth products.

Testing of Bluetooth is a bit hard, there are no graphs I can show you about performance etc, I searched and didn’t find any specific benchmark for Bluetooth. There is certain hardware that I did find for testing Bluetooth but it is very expensive and not something I can invest in at the moment…

I can tell you I do own two other USB Bluetooth adapters, one is a standard type from X-Micro the other is an EDR type from Bluetake. The EDR type has enhanced data rate and range to it, so there isn’t much of a comparison to the Brando product. My experiences with the X-Micro Bluetooth adapter were not that great as the range was short and I experienced a lot of drop outs in transmission of signals. That wasn’t so with the Brando USB Bluetooth Chip (Ultra-slim).

For testing I used my Bluetake Bluetooth headset to listen to music and essentially walk around to get a feel of the range of the Brando USB Bluetooth Chip (Ultra-slim). I found the range to be very good actually I could get almost 25 feet from the adapter before I experienced drop outs in the music and that was with a partial wall between me and the dongle. Going into another room the signal actually did penetrate through the wall but not that far, the wall on the other side of the room is about 10 feet from my computer and I got about 5 feet beyond that and lost the signal.

This product is so thin and flexible that I don’t really see much of a way to actually break it accidentally, unless you have it sticking out of a USB port and hit it, but I tried that and all it did was pop out, it flexed and slid right out of the USB slot. The Brando USB Bluetooth Chip (Ultra-slim) seems virtually indestructible during normal use, but being so small there is the possibility of loosing it though…