The Jabra Eclipse Bluetooth headset sounds off in the lab - Value and Conclusion

The market for hands-free devices is growing very quickly. This growth has been driven by multiple factors including legal ones. In some states they are required for driving which has been pushing the market forward. Sadly, the market has not really moved forward over the last few years. The devices have gotten smaller, but the feature set and battery life has not changed much. Jabra has been working on changing that over the last year and have come out with some great new hands-free kits including the Jabra Eclipse which is what we are taking a look at today.

Value -
Value is another very subjective topic. What is expensive to some might be a deal to others. You can look at this topic in multiple ways. One is raw price and the other is what you get for the money. Each is accurate and both are correct ways to look at price/value. We tend to look at features, performance and real-property when we discuss value. However, we also take into account the raw cash cost of the item. The retail price of the Jabra Eclipse is $129.99 which is on the higher end of Bluetooth headsets. However this does not account for the extra features such as location awareness, speech to text and text to speech and all of the other features enabled by the Jabra Assist app. Most other competing devices do not include a charger like the Eclipse does so the $129.99 is not that bad at all.

Conclusion -
I liked the Jabra Eclipse and the features that it offers, but with the glaring security hole that is in the Android version of the app it falls very short of the mark. If there was a way to enable voice command while leaving the device locked it would be a must have for hands-free kits for both Android and iPhone owners. For the iPhone things are much better, but you lose the ability for the Eclipse to read back your text messages. So there are pros and cons on both sides (with the larger con on the Android side). Now if you are not looking to use the speech to text or voice commands then you are going to get a very solid headset for your phone. It is just not as good as it could be.

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