THE DESIGN
The New Jawbone is the next step in the integration of best in class noise elimination technology with personal design that is both humanistic and minimal.

"The Jawbone strategy we set-out to follow three years ago has proven that products that live on our face need to be designed differently than typical technology wares; we regard them as personal accessories or even jewelry, and, as such, believe they need to be a complete departure from the gadgetry of the mobile and headset industry."
Yves Behar
Chief Designer and CCO of Aliph

In the tradition of bringing together beauty and science, the new Jawbone is a miracle of miniaturization and 50% smaller than the original award-winning Jawbone. Every effort has been made to contain best in class noise elimination technology in the most unassuming, yet richly detailed product.

No Visible Buttons
The "invisible button" policy at Jawbone accomplishes a clutter-free look. Touch-surface technology allows the user to operate switches by lightly pressing the outside shield.

Premium Materials
Constructed with ultra-smooth medical-grade plastic, the new Jawbone also comes with optional fine leather earloops.

The Experience
Comprised of an outer shield and inner surface, the new Jawbone experience is two-fold. The outer shield, curved and rectilinear to follow the face, is lightly textured in a sound-reflective progressive relief, a three-dimensional texture visually representative of noise abatement surfaces. This unique surface becomes animated as light creates highlights and shadows when worn. The inner surface, the one touching the face and creating contact with the Voice Activity Sensor, is gently curved to be ergonomic and comfortable on the skin.

Sophisticated modern industrial style meets the next step in audio technology with the Jawbone Bluetooth headset.

It can be worn on either ear, and you can customize your fit by choosing from one of the included earloops and earbuds.

The Jawbone can be worn on either ear, and it comes with four earloops of varying sizes to fit your lobe. Made of solid metal with a rubber cover, they're fairly comfortable around the ear. The trick, however, is getting it on over the ear, and this is the Jawbone's biggest disappointment. Because it's so stiff, you literally have to use both hands to try to slip it on over your ear. And since we don't wear our headset constantly, we missed a few calls while performing this dance. Also, the metal frame does bend (as we found after carrying it in our pocket), which can be viewed as an annoyance or as a feature--enabling you to form-fit the frame to your ear. It also comes with five ear pads of varying shapes and sizes, and we tried one of the teardrop shaped pads to secure the Jawbone inside our ear sans metal frame--it was comfortable and worked for awhile, but isn't a solution if you're moving around a lot.

As with Steve Jobs, Behar is not a fan of protruding buttons. Thus, the Jawbone's two controls are hidden within the headset, requiring you to press either the front or back of the unit to answer calls, adjust volume, or turn on/off the noise cancellation function. While we've read some reviews that complained about these hidden controls, we had no problem in accessing them and appreciated their tactile response. The Jawbone also comes with a custom-fit recharging cable that can either plug into a PC's USB port or into the included wall jack. We enjoyed the flexibility of the USB charging, but wished the cable could have been a more standard USB mini-jack (for those times when you forget to bring the cable along).

But the true test of the Jawbone is how its "noise shield" performed. First, a little about this technology. The Jawbone has a small piece of rubbery plastic that protrudes from the bulbous microphone and sits flush against your face, and this sensor tells the Jawbone whether or not you're speaking and can remove background noise from your ongoing speech signal. It can also dynamically adjust the volume of the incoming audio from your call.

We tried the Jawbone in a number of different situations, and for the most part it worked flawlessly. Sitting at our desk with the stereo volume cranked up while playing The Chemical Brothers, our call partner was none the wiser. She didn't hear any of the music coming through, and our voice came through strong on her end. While standing on a street corner, the undulations of traffic noise never made it through to our caller, while we noticed an uptick in volume with an increase in traffic noise.

However, the Jawbone wasn't perfect, as it doesn't do a great job in windy situations. Still, for the good majority of situations you'll find yourself in--from busy airports to talk-heavy coffeehouses to traffic-laden city streets--the Jawbone should perform very well, masking the surroundings to improve fidelity for you call partner as well adapting your ear volume to the surrounding environment. We just wish the ear frame was a bit more flexible.

Pros:

• Amazing background noise masking capabilities--even when faced with loud, thumping music
• Outstanding adaptive volume as the environment around you changes
• Options for customizing the fit

• Metal earloop frames are hard to quickly put on
• Non-standard USB connection is a bummer if you forget the cable at home