Does the App-Enabled Jawbone Bluetooth Cell Phone Headset have your Ear?
People can't have enough of their precious apps these days - our mobiles and smart phones have apps of course, but then suddenly, our printers have apps, our TV's have apps and even apps like Facebook have apps. Seeing as how mainstream the word has become, you find it hard to believe how even two years ago, until the iPhone came to have an app store, that word, if you used it, branded you as a raving geek for life. But as popular apps are, don't devices have to be a certain size, be a little grown-up, to begin bandying about words like that? How can a tiny thing you click on your ear like a Bluetooth cell phone headset have apps of its own? Well, that's what the Jawbone Icon has just done; and for something that costs less than $100 to pretend to have an app, some people think is going too far.
When 20 years ago only a few people could actually afford a cell phone, brandishing one, flipping it open and pulling out the antenna, was something people scoffed at - how show-offish and in poor taste that seemed at the time. And now people walk around like they
just stepped out of a Terminator movie, with a Bluetooth cellphone headset clipped to the ear, and talking into thin air, pretending it is the most natural thing in the world, not to mention ultrachic; perhaps they don't realize that they look like those early adopter cell phone enthusiasts from all those years ago. Don't be surprised if like the grandmother in the movie the Beverly Hillbillies, someone looks at them and says, "She thinks she's talking to somebody!". Anyway, as long as there is a market for it, these ear-clip headsets have manufacturers falling over one another providing for it, and now there is one company, Aliph, that is trying to put everyone else in the shade in being to be the most impressive of the lot - with the jawbone icon, the tiniest and the hippest of the lot.
And the improvements they've made to ease of use and dependability is quite astounding. The device comes with a set of rubber rings molded in different sizes for different kinds of ears, even the ears of people who have physical deformities. And it's these that help keep them securely fastened; and if that doesn't seem quite enough, there is a hook that can clutch to the top of the ear for extra grip. Having it make contact with your smart phone is particularly easy - you don't even need any passwords. If you are one of those lawyer types or businessmen who need to carry two or even three phones at a time, your Jawbone Icon Bluetooth cell phone headset, can keep in touch with two of them at the same time, and can remember many different phones so that you don't have to go through the pairing process more than once on any phone.
What is a modern headset without noise cancellation though? What noise cancellation tries to do is, it tries to cancel out regular background sound, like the roar of aircraft engines, traffic, or anything else. It records a sample of the background noise you have in your environment, it generates a reverse signal to cancel it out, and suddenly, you're standing in a quieter world. The Icon's noise cancellation is pretty great, and if you have it positioned properly in your ear, you just hear your conversation and nothing else. In fact, since it funnels the sound right down your ear canal, you'll often hear your conversations better on this, than you would out of the phone.
Some of the Icon's best advances appear in different areas altogether. Take style for instance. It comes in six different zany shapes and textures and arguably, completely different materials. Anything the device wishes to tell you - about its battery charge level or what number you're getting a call from, you have a choice of several voices to choose from. Not only that, it will actually talk you through everything - when you turn it on, when you turn it off - and it thanks you for it in a variety of - what is the word - sexy voices; and no matter what you do to it, it'll respond like it's talking to you. And now onto those promised apps. They have five apps on offer, and you can only use one at a time. One useful app is called Dial2Do allows you to put out a tweet on Twitter by dictating your message and waiting for the service to transcribe it into a written message, for instance. The company says that pretty soon, this will be the only Bluetooth cell phone headset that can, with an app, allow you to get your phone to dial number, or play a song.