Jabra Stone Bluetooth Headset Review

Jabra is rather cheesily calling this headset an ‘earvolution’ because it believes it represents a completely new design approach to the humble Bluetooth headset. Certainly, there’s room for innovation when it comes to headset design, as even the latest models look pretty similar to the first Bluetooth headsets that appeared on the market all those years ago. The Stone tries to be different by doing away with the mic boom that is such an integral part of most of its rivals, but can a headset without a boom really deliver decent call quality?

The Stone definitely looks unusual, but thankfully not in a displeasing way. The wider part is made from hard plastic and houses both the mic and the earpiece. Cleverly, Jabra has managed to seamlessly join this to the softer more malleable ear hook with the result that the whole piece looks rather like an oversize apostrophe. This design coupled with the fact that the headset is so light at just 7g makes it comfortable to wear even for long periods.

But it’s not just the shape of the headset that’s unusual; it’s also different in that it’s supplied with a separate charging dock that has its own built-in battery. This is where the headset gets its name from as when it clips into the centre of this dock, the two combined look somewhat like a polished onyx stone. The headset itself has no charging port so the only way to charge it is by having this charging dock to hand. It has a standard micro-USB port and comes with a wall charger. However, the wall chargers lead is ridiculously short, measuring a mere 14cm long, so you pretty much have to just dangle the dock from it when it’s plugged in to a normal height wall socket, which looks rather inelegant.

The Stone and its charging dock are interdependent as the headset’s tiny battery is only good for two hours of talk time. This is why the charging dock has it own internal battery so you can use it to recharge the Stone up to three times during the day. In our opinion this is a compromise too far, as we don’t like the way you have to carry two different units around with you during the day, despite the fact that the charging dock is rather small

Even on larger headsets, the controls can be quite fiddly to use and so given its small size you wouldn’t expect the Stone to exactly excel in this area. And sadly, it doesn’t. The Jabra logo on the outside of the headset marks where you need to press to activate its sole push button control. This acts as a multifunction switch. For example, a single tap picks up or drops a call, double tapping it redials the last number and holding the button down for a few seconds turns the headset on and off. There isn’t much travel on the button so often you need to rely on the tone that’s sounded when a button press is registered to make sure that you’ve actually pressed it correctly.

The outside face of the headset also acts as a touch slider to turn the volume up and down. As on Jabra’s stereo Halo headset, which also features a touch volume control, this is actually quite tricky to use when you’ve got the headset in your ear as you can’t actually see or feel where exactly you need to place your finger in order to accurately use the slider.

There are a couple of other downsides to the design as well. For example, the headset can feel a tad loose on your ear because the ear hook doesn’t really ‘grip’ the ear but instead tends to just perch on top of it. It didn’t fall out of place while we were using it, but it did threaten to on a couple of occasions. Secondly, as there’s no way to flip the earpiece around, the headset can only be worn in the right ear, which means it’s probably not a good choice for lefties.

(centre)”’The charging dock comes with a clothing clip”’(/centre)

On the plus side, Jabra has managed to cram quite a few features into the Stone’s small frame. For starters, it’s multipoint compatible so you can have it paired with two devices simultaneously. For example, you could have it hooked up to a smartphone you use for work at the same time as a standard mobile that gets used for personal calls. The Stone also supports A2DP for wireless audio streaming from compatible handsets. This isn’t exactly a must-have feature on a mono headset, but it might come in useful for viewing some online videos on your phone or something similar, and the headset does combine the two tracks to create a new mono track rather than simply using the left or right channel of the stereo track.

Of course, the lack of a boom for the mic means that the mic is further away from your mouth than on most other headsets. To compensate for this, Jabra has had to use more advanced noise-cancelling technology in the Stone. It reckons its new system is twice as good at blocking out background noise as that used on its previous headsets.

Like most noise-cancelling headsets, the Stone uses two mics. The one positioned on the front edge is used to pick up speech while the one on the rear records background ambient sounds. The feeds from these two mics are then processed by the internal DSP to cut out as much background noise as possible.

In use, it certainly does a good job of blocking consistent sounds such as engine noise in a car. However, when faced with a noisy café or shopping centre it’s less impressive. In these situations, callers reported that although it blocked much of the noise, it also made the audio on the call sound a bit metallic and overly processed with the result that speech wasn’t as intelligible as perhaps it should be. On the plus side, the earpiece does its job well producing loud and clean audio that makes callers easy to hear even in noisier environments where the Stone will cleverly automatically boost the volume.

”’Verdict”’

There’s no doubting that the Stone is one of the most stylish and unobtrusive headsets on the market at the moment. However, we don’t like the way you have to carry the charging dock with you during the day and the lack of a boom mic means the noise-cancelling technology has to work harder and at times this affects call quality. At the end of the day, we think the Stone is a good buy for those who want a headset that’s as unobtrusive as possible, but if call quality and battery life are more important to you then something like the Aliph Jawbone Prime might be a better option.