SmartSeries Bluetooth Electric Toothbrush

The basics

Bluetooth is invading everything from scales to lightbulbs, and now even your bathroom. That's right, the folks at Oral-B have put together an electric toothbrush armed with Bluetooth in the form of the Pro 6500 SmartSeries, and it even syncs up with your phone. It's all to improve your dental hygiene and instil some good habits along with tracking where you're going wrong, but is it really worth the £249.99 price tag? We squeezed out the toothpaste and gave our jaws a good brushing to find out.

The good

Brushing our teeth is something we all do daily but, according to Oral-B, we generally don't do it for long enough. That's why the company’s range of electric toothbrushes are armed with built-in timers that buzz once two minutes have elapsed, but even those aren’t fool-proof. Instead, Oral-B is going visual with its latest smart toothbrush, which not only comes with a wireless timer to offer feedback - dubbed as a "SmartGuide" - but your new toothbrush can also link up with your iPhone or Android handset with an app to help improve your brushing habits.

The Pro 6500 we tried is decked in a slick black finish with blue LED lights to indicate battery and Bluetooth activity, and it’s a welcome change to the bland white models Oral-B has produced in the past. There are three additional brushing heads in the box, a charging cradle and a travel case. The Pro 6500 also features five different brushing modes, such as Daily Clean, Sensitive, Gum Care, Whitening and Deep Clean - some of which require different brushing heads, but unless you have specific needs the Daily Clean option will be your go-to mode.

While you can easily survive using just the bundled SmartGuide timer, the Pro 6500 really shines when you've hooked it up to your phone, which can also provide you with a two minute timer and graphs of your recent brushing habits. You're able to look at your daily, weekly and monthly brushing activity, and you can check out your average session length and whether you've used too much pressure or not. There are reminders built-in for things like flossing, cleaning your tongue and rinsing with mouthwash, helping to keep your mouth in minty-fresh condition. Hit a streak of days where you've smashed your timed goals and you'll be rewarded with a trophy; you can even check out other dental and brushing tips to maximise time spent in front of the mirror.

The bad

The toothbrush itself offers a step-up from most of Oral-B's range, and most of the products in Philips' Sonicare family as well, but we couldn't help but think it was trying to do too much. For starters, the app is rather convoluted, and a lot of its features seem to be all over the place. It's nice to check your agenda for the day along with top news headlines and the weather, but the sheer number of features merely offer a distraction rather than helping you to concentrate on brushing - which is Oral-B's goal here.

Oral-B also wants you to brush each quadrant of your mouth, but there's no way for the toothbrush to actually monitor that or prompt you where you're going wrong, with the app and SmartGuide only timing your brushing duration. We'd love to see Oral-B offer even closer tracking for your teeth, but that'll only up the price even more - £249 is already expensive for a toothbrush.

The bottom line

Oral-B's Pro 6500 SmartSeries toothbrush is expensive at a penny under £250, and it seems more of a novelty than an essential piece of kit at the moment. Bluetooth and the companion app are not killer features for a toothbrush, but there’s plenty of scope for improvement, and this first version shows that just like with tracking your fitness, you'll pick up better habits along the way. Unfortunately, Oral-B has crammed too many features into both the toothbrush and the app to make it worth the asking price - but if this is the future of brushing, it's on the right track.

- See more at: http://gadgetshow.channel5.com/gadget-news/oral-b-pro-6500-smartseries-bluetooth-electric-toothbrush#sthash.TGkxefyh.dpuf