Jabra Supreme Bluetooth Headset Review

I have been eagerly awaiting the Jabra Supreme bluetooth headset. I always find boom based headset sounds better. While the Jabra is a bit larger then, say the Jawbone, I find that it is still small and comfortable to wear. I like the flip boom design, where it switches on and off as you flip the boom open and close. Very natural. When the boom is folded in, the headset is smaller but still pretty thick. I wish for $99, Jabra ship the headset with a case.

Out of the Box Experience

The out of the box experience is pretty good, with the standard exception of needing to charge the unit up before first use. It is very nice that it comes with both a charger with a fixed cable, and an additoinal USB to micro USB cable so that you can use your computer to charge it up. It took just over an hour to get the headset fully charge.

Initial Pairing

Because the Supreme has "Voice Guidance", it will literally talk you thru the initial pairing. You can see this video of the voice guidance in action. I suppose you are expected to wear the headset to listen to the instruction, but I thought (wrongly) that I have to press some buttons, so I had the headset off. The voice guidance is loud enough that I can hear it anyway.

[embed]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bg3KirLo3fI[/embed]

Comfort

The headset is really light. To be fair most of the new generation headsets are light. 18 grams. You really would not notice it. I wear eyeglasses, and it still fit over my very thin eyeglasses frame without problem. If anything I find that it is a little lose. I don't think I can jog in it.

Sound Quality

I say the sound quality is fair, which is good for a bluetooth headset. The noise cancelling works very well. I place a test call with the radio blasting in the office and much of that is muted out.

Voice Control and Guidance

Of course the Jabra is no Siri! But the voice system works surprisingly well. In fact if I do not have an iPhone with Siri, I would be really impressed. You can say "what can I say" and the headset will read you a list of available commands. One that is particularly useful is "phone commands". When you say "phone commands" it passes you thru to the phone. Since I have Siri activated on the iPhone, it starts Siri up for me. However, currently the Jabra Supreme firmware does not work with Siri. I can hear Siri, but Siri cannot hear me. Jabra promised a fix really soon.

Pros

• boom design for initiative on/off
• long battery life (5+ hours)
• comes with a charger and an extra cable for computer charging
• voice guidance and commands

Cons

• Does not work with IOS5, no SIRI, no Skype. Jabra promise a fix real soon, check their support page to see when it is available.
• Does not come with a case

Links

• Main product page at Jabra
• More Pictures of the package

How to use siri and Reminder effectively

We all love Siri, and scheduling reminders verbally, right? But you are not getting the most out of it unless you do the following, if you are a iCloud user with other devices and macs:

1. Delete your local Reminder list in Reminder, leaving the iCloud reminder list
2. On your Mac(s) calendar program, go to View / Show Reminders
3. (optionally) on your iPhone change Settings/Sound for reminders so that you know a reminder has gone off as oppose to other events.

Now when you schedule a reminder with siri, it will automatically synced to your macs and ipads, and it will show up on all devices!

siri is amazing

There, I said it. Siri really is amazing. People who think it is just voice recognition software need to try it before passing judgement. This is BETA according to Apple, learning a trick from Google. That just means they are going to tweak it with user data. Some of these things are not working (yet):

1. It does not work with third party app. "Play Norah Jones" only work if you have her music on your music library. We need it to work with Rdio or Spotify, like Dragon Go does.
2. It does not take multiple calendars into account. I have 25 appointments next week according to "check my schedule", what I really want is "check my work schedule"
3. You would think you can send tweets from siri, with all the twitter integration, but you cannot. You can say "text twitter" if you have twitter setup as an account with code 40404, the standard twitter SMS interface. You will be using your SMS credits though.
4. It will be nice if it interface with either the calculator app or something more streamlined for basic calculation, and then read back the result instead of showing me a wolfram alpha page.