If it does not however then why on earth are you leaving your headset turned on when you are asleep in bed? Surely it should be turned off charging somewhere.

I would argue that the way it works makes sense, as why bother upsetting everyone else in the room with your alarm/ring tone if you are wearing your headset? Although it would be nice to be given the choice its a sensible default behaviour. There is little logic to leaving your headset powered on if you are not wearing it so its a fairly logical assumption that you are.

You leave it on because, if the phone rings, you are going to answer it using your headset, of course. Pretty much every phone I've owned, quite a few, does it this way - and it's the right way. The headset is on but in my shirt pocket. The phone is in my pocket or in a holster. The phone rings, I hear it, I put the headset on and answer.

Otherwise you are wearing your headset 24x7, like a dork.

The other phones will ring out through the headset, or at least send a ring tone - so if you have it on, you will hear it there as well.

To mute the phone, you mute the phone.

Now, should all that be configurable? Sure, that would be great.

But the default being the same as everyone else - audio out through the phone, phone audio out/in through the headset? Perfect.

This is for a PHONE headset. For audio headphones, audio should route out through the headphones. Just like everyone else.

And, for the record, this exact bug is what caused me to cancel my N900 order. I'll wait to see if this gets fixed because, from perspective, this is a deal breaker.