Jabra Stone Review

Editor's Score
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The Verdict: The Jabra Stone is stunning to look at and is packed full of features. Just make sure it fits your ear before you buy it.

Most designers will tell you that good design is a product of form and function. If you can make a device look great and function well, you’ve mastered the formula for the perfect design. The Jabra Stone is a device that comes very close to making this equation work. On first look, the Jabra Stone seems like the perfect example of form and function merging gracefully, resulting in a stunning product that works brilliantly. Shaped true to its name the device is in the form of a perfectly rounded stone, about two inches wide and one inch deep. If we haven’t stressed it enough already, this is one sleek looking device.

The Jabra Stone includes a dock and a headset. The oblate spheroid-shaped (shaped like an MnM or Skittle) dock is portable and can be used to recharge the headset on the go.  The headset can be removed from the dock by placing your thumb underneath the stone and pushing the headset outwards. The headset is U shaped with one thick end and one thin end.  It’s rather small compared to other headsets and if you have long hair, it would probably go unnoticed.

The Jabra Stone also comes with a number of excellent functionalities, the three most prominent of which are multipoint connectivity, A2DP streaming and noise-canceling. Multipoint connectivity allows you to connect to multiple Bluetooth devices at once. A2DP streaming means that you can listen to songs from your phone or MP3 player on your Jabra headset via Bluetooth. The noise-cancelling technology is also fairly efficient, provided you can get the ear-piece to sit comfortably in your ear canal.

We tested the Jabra Stone with a Blackberry Curve and the sync was painless and instantaneous.

The Stone has a series of controls along the headset. The headset gets activated as soon as you take it out of the dock. You can also manually activate it by pressing it at the fat end of the U-shaped headset. The button isn’t really visible but it’s there. The volume controls can also be activated by sliding your hand up or down the headset. It’s all very stylish and stealthy. However, the device is not without fault.

While the device looks great, it has a few issues. First of all, I couldn’t get it to fit properly in my ear. Even after experimenting with various different ear bud add-ons, the device didn’t quite sit snugly on the ear. The fact that the earphone wasn’t quite settled into the ear canal meant that my telephone conversations sounded faint. To counter this, I kept pushing the earphone closer to the ear canal, which meant accidentally pressing one of the buttons on the headset. This led to some rather frustrating moments amid important phone calls. The charge on the headset lasts approximately two hours without having to dock it again. While the dock is portable and you can recharge it a few times with the dock without having to recharge the dock, it’s still annoying to have to keep charging it every now and then. However, unless you constantly get calls throughout the day, you’re probably not going to find this limitation as annoying.

The Jabra Stone is an incredibly sleek device with some great features. Keep in mind that the device only fits in on the right ear and you’ll want to test that it fits comfortably on your ear before you buy it. If you do find it a good fit, you’ll love using this Bluetooth headset.