In your ear while on the go

TOP SOUND QUALITY and good battery life help make the sleek and lightweight Jabra Eclipse a smart buy among Bluetooth headsets.

The Danish manufacturer Jabra has come up with an elegant design in a headset that weighs only 5.5 grams and measures 50x18x25mm. And it looks great clipped into your right ear, ultra-comfortable in four EarGel sizes – large to extra small. Make sure you get the correct size and the headset will be a snug fit while keeping out surrounding noise.

The good battery life is due to an internal cell affording three hours of talk time. You get a portable charger to boost that by another seven hours, so you have the peace of mind that you’re good to go for a total of 10 hours.

The charger is quite neat in its round shape. No cord necessary: You just slide the headset into the slot on the charger. It automatically switches off to save what remains in its battery and switches back on when removed from the charger, ready to resume life’s conversation.

Eclipse adds Power Nap technology to extend the standby time. When the headset is out of range of your connected phone for more than 15 minutes, the headset goes into Power Nap mode and will stay there for up to seven days. You need to dock the headset in the charging case and then, to exit Power Nap, undock it.

The Eclipse has no buttons, instead operating by voice command and a touch control. When there’s an incoming call while the headset is docked, you just lift it from the charging case to answer. If you want to reject or end the call, dock the headset again. When the headset is in your ear, you can answer a call by gently double-tapping it or saying, “Answer.” End the call with another double-tap. To reject a call, say, “Ignore.”

The Eclipse supports the iOS Siri, Google Now and Windows Phone Cortana voice-command personal assistants. With the headset in your ear you can activate any of these by double-tapping it.

When used with an Android phone, you can have text messages read out to you, hands-free. You can respond in text message via Google Now as well.

The sweet sound quality is courtesy of a 6mm dynamic speaker with 94dB sensitivity at 16 ohms’ independence. The speaker has a frequency range of 20Hz to 20kHz.

In my test I got loud and clear sound, including music, though it’s only mono sound since there’s only one speaker. The noise-cancellation technology, called Advanced Noise Blackout, uses two microphones for eliminating ambient chatter. I found out how well this works while wearing the headset as I rode my bicycle. The person I was talking to on the phone could hear me fine and picked up no inkling of the wind rushing by at all.

It’s not difficult connecting the Eclipse to an NFC-enabled smartphone. The portable charger has an NFC (near field communications) antenna. Touch the charger to the back of your phone and the NFC will automatically establish a Bluetooth link. For a non-NFC phone, you press the Jabra button on the bottom of the charging case while wearing the headset and follow the spoken instructions. 

You can also install the free “Jabra Assist” app on your phone to establish the connection between phone and headset even more easily. The app is useful in other ways. Use it to customise your in-call audio, change the headset language, allow automatic text read-outs and update the headset firmware.

RTB Technology sells the Jabra Eclipse in white or black for Bt4,490 at Jay Mart, iStudio, Power Buy, King Power and Power Mall.

 

Key Specs

 

- Weight: Headset 5.5g, charging case 35g

- Dimensions: Headset 49.95x17.58x24.82mm, charging case 62.2x54x25.5mm

- Microphones: Two omni-directional MEMS

- Microphone frequency range: 100Hz to 8kHz

- Microphone sensitivity: 14dB +/- 3dB

- Speaker type: 6mm dynamic

- Speaker sensitivity: 94dB at 1mW / 1kHz

- Speaker impedance: 16 ohm

- Speaker maximum input power: 5mW

- Speaker frequency range: 20Hz to 20kHz

- Operating range: Up to 30m

- Bluetooth version: 4.1

- Paired devices: Up to eight connected to two at the same time (MultiUse)

- Supported Bluetooth profiles: Headset (v1.2), hands-free (v1.6), A2DP (v1.3), phonebook access (v1.0)

- Talk/battery time: Up to 10 hours (three hours in headset, up to seven in charging case)

- Standby time: Up to three days

- Power Nap time: Up to seven days

- Charging time: Two hours for headset only, three hours for headset and charging case together