Bluetooth Wireless Headsets

Review: Jawbone 2 Bluetooth Earpiece

I’ve never been a fan of bluetooth earpieces. I always thought it was kind of weird to see people walking along and seemingly talking to themselves, or emitting a bright blue pulse from a LED on their earpiece. After hearing about the Aliph Jawbone 2 bluetooth earpiece all too much, I decided to see what all the fuss was about. If you live in California, chances are you will need to pick up a hands-free earpiece sooner or later to comply with the newest driving regulation so keep reading.

First off, why is the Jawbone so popular anyway and why isn’t this the first time you’ve heard of it? Aliph’s original Jawbone was marketed as a stylish earpiece with remarkable call quality due to signal processing developed for DARPA that reduced background noise.

It’s called the Jawbone because each earpiece has a “Voice Activity Sensor” that rests on your cheek and detects if you are talking so it can filter out background noise accordingly. Now with the Jawbone 2, Aliph has taken two years of customer feedback and improved call quality and made it half the size. As you might imagine, the Jawbone 2 is at the high-end of the cell phone accessories scale and retails for $129 USD.

There’s not much in the Jawbone 2 box other than a charger, the earpiece itself and a few earbuds and loops to accommodate different users. The packaging is almost like the new iPods in their small plastic cases. After taking the earpiece out, Aliph recommends charging it for 50 minutes. The charger is travel-sized and the cable can be disconnected and plugged into a USB port for an alternative method of charging. The end of the cable that attaches to the Jawbone 2 is magnetic a la MagSafe so there’s no fidgeting with a latch as is often the case with other bluetooth earpieces.

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