Aliph Jawbone Prime in "Yello!" (Aliph photo)
Given their tiny size, it is amazing the amount of engineering that goes into making a Bluetooth headset such as the Aliph Jawbone Prime.
Wireless headsets have to maintain a signal with the cell phone to which they are paired, fit snugly, but not too snugly, in the user’s ear (and everybody’s ears are different) and enable people on both ends of the call to hear each other clearly, regardless of wind or background noise.
Oh, and they can’t be much larger than a stick of Dentyne chewing gum.
For Jawbone, there’s one more engineering challenge. A tiny button on the tip of the headset – called the voice activity sensor (VAS) -- has to touch the user’s face to pick up, not the sound of their voice, but the vibration of their voice. Jawbone is so named for its unique technology that picks up the vibrations of the user’s jawbone to determine what they are saying.
I used a Jawbone Prime for about two weeks and found it worked as advertised; people could hear me and I could hear them, despite ambient noise, riding in a car or standing beside the running dishwasher in my home as I talked.
The VAS technology is backed up by an acoustic voice activity detector (AVAD), which picks up the voice when the VAS is not touching the user’s face. Anecdotally, a few people I know say they couldn’t get the Jawbone to touch their face. On top of that, Jawbone uses what it calls “NoiseAssassin” noise cancelling technology to quiet ambient noise.
The Jawbone Prime uses NoiseAssassin 2.0, an improvement over noise cancellation in previous generation Jawbone’s. It also includes what Aliph calls a “Sensor Signal Fusion” system to reduce wind noise.
Jawbone Prime also gives users options for getting the right ear fit for all those different sizes and shapes of ears out there, including six different ear gels and two ear loops.
The Aliph people know quite well that Bluetooth headsets are fashion accessories (left) as well as functional devices. The Jawbone Prime comes in black, brown and platinum, but also is avaiable in one of the new EarCandy collection colors with clever names like Frankly Scarlet, “Yello!”, Drop me a Lime and Lilac You Mean It. The Prime also updates the sleek compact design of previous Jawbones with a textured cover plate that not only looks futuristic, it hides the controls. There is no obvious button on the shell; the user simply depresses a section of the shell to turn the Prime on and off and presses on the top of the headset to adjust the volume.
Personally, I’m one of those who like the tactile feedback from depressing a button as confirmation I am activating a particular function. At times I wasn’t sure if my depressing one section of the shell actually registered. I also had some difficulty pairing the device to my smartphone, but it could have been the quirkiness of my phone or my ineptitude at following the instructions. But mysteriously, I sometimes lost the pairing connection with my phone.
Jawbone Prime has been compared to another recent entry in the Bluetooth headset market, Plantronics’ Voyager Pro, which also delivers improved audio, but lists for just $100.
Still, Jawbone has won over a lot of customers with its cool design and competent technology built into the $130 device. Jawbone has already won kudos from reviewers for its engineering and design and Aliph has improved on it with the Prime.
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