Jabra Supreme - Performance And Verdict

Sound quality while listening to music or podcasts through the headset is not something it is designed for but the Jabra Supreme does support the A2DP profile allowing for streaming of audio from multimedia and GPS apps.

We listened to podcasts and the radio while testing the headset but the quality was far from perfect. This however could be more to do with the inherent problem of streaming audio over Bluetooth but considering a mono headset is not designed for listening to music in the first place, it isn't a major drawback of the headset.

Pressing the Voice Control button gives you access to a number of voice commands. Battery, Pair new device, redial, call back and cancel are all self explanatory and work well – though our accent did confuse them on a number of occasions.

The final command, and the most important, is “Phone command”. This will give you access to your phones’ menu and let you voice dial anyone in your contacts list. While it worked perfectly with an iPhone 4 we were unable eto get it to work with the HTC Evo 3D.

When we contacted Jabra about this, they sent us a compatibility spreadsheet for all its devices. While the Supreme is yet to be added to the list we were pointed towards the Stone saying it would have pretty similar compatibility.

It shows that the majority of HTC devices do not support voice dialling, even high-end phones like the Sensation. However the Supreme should work well with all BlackBerry devices and other Android devices but we would suggest checking before purchasing.

While a problem like this is certainly a drawback, the issue is not with the Supreme but with support from specific handset manufacturers.

Jabra claims that one charge, via the supplied USB cable (a cigarette lighter adapter is also included), will give you up to six hours talk time and 15 days of standby time.

In our tests we found that Jabra is not far off in its estimation, as we got between five and five-and-a-half hours use from the headset, which is decent if not mind-blowing.

Verdict

On first viewing the Jabra Supreme headset certainly looks the part. Compact and stylish it certainly doesn’t draw unnecessary attention to your ear. Add to this unrivalled sound quality for both parties thanks to active noise cancellation and it seems like the Jabra Supreme is a winner. However poor support for the voice commands, a rather flimsy feel and a high price tag means it falls short of our getting a recommended sticker.