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Jabra Sport Pulse Wireless Headset Review - Sport and Sound

Details: By Sean Kalinich; Feb 01; Hits: 27569

One area that is booming in the consumer electronic field is health and fitness wearables. For the last year or so we have watched multiple new products hit the market as this particular vertical tries to find an identity. One of the items that we have been able to take a deeper look at in the lab is the Jabra Sport Pulse Bluetooth headphones. These are interesting because in addition to being headphones they can also take your pulse and track progress through different workouts. Let’s take a look and see if these stand out from the crowd or if they are just another device in the sea of also rans.

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Jabra Sports and Sound Apps -
One of the apps that “comes” with the Sport Pulse is the Jabra Sport app. This app is a fitness and workout tracking app that is compatible with Android and Apple. It is a pretty nice one at that and allows you to track different styles of workouts, your heart rate, and also lets you add audio directly into your workout. It uses a background application called JabraService. It combines the functions of the Sport Pulse and makes them available to your phone.

Diving into the Jabra Sport app we find that you can customize it quite a bit. You can set it to just track what you are doing or you can actually set goals and progress. One of the nicer features is that you can set a target for your workout including pace, heartrate and number of calories burned. Each of these individual targets can also be customized to the specific workout you want to perform.

Outside of the fitness aspect you can also customize the type of audio you are listening to and the view you see when you are working out. There are three default views including a map view that tracks your workout through GPS. These views also have customizable areas so you can change them to suit your needs. The level of customization is very impressive.

Jabra also gives you some additional features including a couple of fitness tests and a way to track your progress and goals. As far as a fitness app goes, this is one of the better ones that we have used it. If Jabra included a way to track weight and food intake it would be even better.

Jabra Sound -
The Jabra Sound app is something that is an extra with the Sport Pulse and you have to use an included code to enable it. The sound app is another music player, but it also features some optimizations specific to the Sport. Dolby is the technology behind the optimizations that include a custom EQ setting and other digital enhancements. Sadly the player does not feature any type of streaming support so you will need to have the music you want to listen to local on your device. You can build playlists, but they are not the easiest to build or get to when you first run the app. The YouTube and Jukebox option also require that you build out something separate. For YouTube it is Bookmarks and JukeBox needs you to setup a partylist (just like a playlist). You can also share your Partylists if you wanted to.