OK Headset - good sound quality

Author's Rating:

Pros: Great sound quality, easy setup

Cons: Occasional loss of bluetooth link, doesn't hug face like other headsets

The Bottom Line: 
For the $99 that I paid, I think it was a good buy. The sound quality is excellent.

Author's Review
I have been with Cingular (formerly Bellsouth Mobility) since hurricane Andrew and the need for a cellular phone to deal with rebuilding my home. I recently traded in my LG L1200 phone for the new Motorola Razr V3 simply because the phone was slim and easy to slip in the pocket.

However, the phone is very dangerous to try and answer a call in the car, so I decided on buying a headset for safety reasons. I originally was going to buy a Motorola headset because a friend had one and was pleased with it.

Quite by accident, I ended up at a Sprint/Nextel store near where I work thinking that it was a Cingular store. I thought, "what the heck? Bluetooth is Bluetooth." The store had two brands of headsets available and one was the Jabra. The price difference was only about $20 more for the Jabra. The salesman told me that it had an excellent talk time and was one of the more comfortable headsets on the market. I decided to try it.

Setup was a snap with the Razr. I charged the headset for a full 8 hours (recommended) and placed it into "discovery mode". I then had the phone find any Bluetooth device and it found the Jabra with no problem.

It took a little getting used to setting the volume to balance between being able to hear calls clearly in a noisy environment AND a suitable volume for the caller at the other end. Evidently the volume for listening also affects the volume of the microphone. If it's too loud, the other person complains that everything is distorted.

Once set, everyone has reported to me that my voice is clear with almost no static or garbling. The only complaint was when I was outside and it was very windy. I was told that it was hard to hear me.

I have had the unit now for about 3 weeks with very few problems. However, I have noticed that occasionally it will lose the Bluetooth link even when the phone is in my pocket on the same side of my body. I have not noticed any constant reason for this - the instructions recommend having the phone on the same side of the body as the headset, so I don't know if the amount of metal (i.e., belt buckle, change, etc) affects the connection. It was quite annoying when the link was lost because I had received a call at that very moment.

I originally was wearing it with the ear pad that was on the unit in the packaging. I found it constantly coming out of my ear and barely hanging on. It wasn't until I looked in the bag of extra buds that I noticed a longer bud. After replacing it, the unit fit comfortably all day and the bud stayed in my ear canal with no problem.

Another nice feature of this unit is that it has an option to vibrate when a call is incoming. This is especially helpful when the phone is set to silent during meetings. This feature can be turned on or off.

The user's manual is quite sketchy.... poorly written in my estimation. I would have liked to have a manual with a little more detailed information - such as the sizes of the buds and how they can help for a more comfortable fit.

The unit charges very quickly. I place it in the charging cradle at the end of the day and it usually is fully charged within 30-45 minutes.

The only other thing that I could fault it with is that it doesn't "hug" the face like the Motorola models do. The microphone tends to hang a bit away from the cheek thereby making the headset quite obvious.

All in all, I would consider this a good buy. Call quality is good, it has some convenient features, and is fairly easy to use.

My only complaints are the loss of link from time to time (and I don't know if this is the headset or the phone causing the problem) and the fact that it is more "obvious" than other, smaller models.

ADDENDUM At the suggestion of another member, I am adding the information about standby and talk time for the battery. The unit is rated at approx. 8 hours of talk time. I do not spend a lot of time on the cellphone and I always place the unit on the charger at the end of the day. So, I can't really rate the battery life if it were left off the charger for a long period of time. I can say that I've had it turned on all day from 7AM until about 6PM on standby with maybe an hour of actual talk time and had no problems. I hope that this is helpful for some users.