Cardo Scala Rider review

With a Bluetooth headset, you can take your mobile conversations around the office, onto the street, and into your car without being tangled in the messy wires found on a traditional cell phone headset. And now with the Cardo Scala Rider Bluetooth headset, you can even chat wirelessly during your next motorcycle ride. The Scala Rider brings a Bluetooth headset to your motorcycle helmet and offers superior audio quality without requiring you to stop your bike to chat. The design needs important refinements to make it more user-friendly (the tiny buttons were especially troublesome), but the Scala Rider is nonetheless a satisfactory first try at a convenient and innovative cell phone solution for motorcyclists.

Though it shares part of its name with Cardo's Scala 500 Bluetooth headset, the Cardo Scala Rider looks nothing like its sibling. In fact, it resembles no other Bluetooth headset we've seen before. Its most prominent feature is a compact (1.18 ounces), wedge-shaped battery pack that fastens to the outside of our helmet. To attach it, we had only to slide a strong clamp between the helmet's inner padding and exterior shell, then secure it with the included Allen wrench. The whole process took just a few minutes, and though the fit was extremely secure, the clamp left no marks on the helmet and did not damage it in any way. The battery pack is also weather resistant for rain and snow.

Extending out from the battery pack are a speaker that wraps up to the right ear and a short boom mic that extends out toward the mouth. Both the mic and the speaker fit comfortably inside the helmet but only after we tinkered with the placement for some time. While it's best to have the speaker as close to your ear as possible, there is such a thing as too close. After long periods, it began to rub against our ear until it was quite painful. The same was true for the microphone. If we didn't put it close enough to our mouth, no one could hear us, but if we put it too close, it was uncomfortable as well.