| Review of the Jawbone Prime Headset |
| Review of the Jawbone Prime Headset |
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The Jawbone Prime is a Bluetooth headset that allows you to talk hands-free without attaching any wires to your phone. Note that your phone MUST have Bluetooth for this headset to be of any use to you. Last Updated: 03-Oct-2009 |
I would like to thank Howard Chu for lending me his Jawbone Prime.
It’s been quite some time since I did my last Bluetooth
headset review (almost 6 years in fact) and so I fully expected the quality of
the devices to have improved accordingly with time. I also expected that the
current iteration of the much-touted Jawbone headset would be a wonder of modern
technology and put the old devices to shame. I was in for a rather nasty
surprise.
Let me say right off that the Jawbone does manage to live up to its hype
concerning noise cancellation, but aside from that I found virtually nothing to
like about this device. It starts with form-over-function design philosophy in
which usability and practicality take a backseat to style. This is most evident
the first time you try to press the Jawbone into your ear while you are in a
call. It’s virtually impossible to do without inadvertently hanging up. This is
because the engineers tried to create a buttonless design in which all of the
functional buttons are actuated by pressing on parts of the shell. Looks great,
works terribly.
To their credit the designers provide numerous ways of wearing the earpiece and
they include a wide range of grommets to best fit the user’s ear. It also
includes a hook for putting around the ear, but I just couldn’t find a
combination that worked for me. Maybe my ear is just weird, but at no time did I
ever feel comfortable wearing this device.
But let’s put the mechanical deficiencies of this product aside for a moment and
deal with the issues that are paramount to a device whose sole purpose is to act
as a speaker and a microphone. How does this thing sound? Well, on the incoming
side the tonal balance is tinny with a thin quality that just doesn’t come close
to matching what one would expect from such an expensive earpiece. Granted, the
overall clarity is good, but it sounds like a cheap earplug from an old AM radio
circa 1970.
Outgoing tonal balance is quite the opposite with a rather muddy quality to it.
Even when there is no background noise the sound is muffled and indistinct
compared to the native microphone of my Nokia N95, on which I performed the
tests. Once background noise is present however, the sound quality just goes
downhill from there.
While the Jawbone Prime does a remarkable job of blotting out the background
noise, it does so at the expense of the user’s voice. The sound becomes choppy
and far less distinct as more and more noise is blanked. The tonal balance
doesn’t really change, but the overall clarity most certainly does. However, I
will say that under severe noise conditions it is preferable to listen to
someone calling on the Jawbone than on any other type of microphone where the
background noises get through.
Perhaps one of the most annoying aspects of the Jawbone’s noise reduction (from
the viewpoint of the person at the other end of the line) is the dead silence
when the user isn't talking. Under these circumstances it makes the caller think
the connection has dropped. It’s very frustrating, and it’s why comfort noise
was developed. Too bad the Jawbone doesn’t offer this feature.
Finally, don’t get me started on the packaging. I spent an inordinate amount of
time dreaming of sarcastic ways to mention this, but in the end I just decided
to come right and say that Jawbone Prime has some of the most incredibly
wasteful Earth-hating packaging you could possibly imagine. The volume of
plastic used in the box far exceeds the amount consumed by the earpiece and its
charger combined and I saw no mention that they’d used recycled plastic.
So there you have it. I could find no redeeming features of the Jawbone Prime that would temp me to personally plunk down over $100 for one. In fact, I'd be loathe to use it even if someone gave me one for free. The sound quality on both incoming and outgoing calls is just so below what I've come to expect from cell phones that using this device would feel like taking a giant step back in time. It does only one things well, and that's to blank background noise. So, if you have a serious problem with your callers complaining about the background noise when to speak with them, the Jawbone Prime might be a reasonably solution for you, but for day-to-day use I simply cannot recommend this Bluetooth headset.
