I didn't like the new Jawbone and took it back to store
I seem to have some incompatibility with new hip’n’cool headsets. Previously there was the Freetalk affair. Which ended fine, btw — I shipped it back and got most of my money back (minus some restocking fee or whatever). No harm done. Try again some other time.
But now, I thought I’d give the new Jawbone a try.
It started out very well. The packaging is super super nice. As good as Apple I’d say. Typical problem with consumer electronics is that they’re packaged in some sort of plastics that is welded together and you have to somehow cut and tear it open and almost kill yourself in the process, cutting yourself to pieces and spilling blood all over the place. Not a good way to start the product relation. Not so with Jawbone, though. Their packaging is high-quality plastic that you can keep around, and the documentation is also very nice.
But, but, but… I connected it to my Mac as a Bluetooth headset. And the sound quality was simply crap. I don’t know if it’s something that I did, but I have a very low tolerance for things not working out of the box and don’t think that I should debug them extensively. Either they work for me or they don’t. Jawbone didn’t.
Looking deeper into it, one of the reasons why I got Jawbone is that I’m working on something that involves speech recognition, and I was thinking of using Jawbone as a portable microphone. But it was pretty much useless for this, because turns out that the damn thing samples at… wait for it…
8000 Hz.
8000 Hz!?!?!?!? Well, that’s what /Library/Preferences/com.apple.audio.DeviceSettings.plist tells me, anyway.
At this day and age, sampling sound at 8000 Hz and claiming any sort of quality at all is, well, blasphemy. And needless to say, for speech recognition purposes, it was pretty much useless because 8000 Hz (meaning the effective sound rate is just 4000 Hz) cuts off high frequencies and made the recongnizer simply not work at all. Plus, my Skype conversation sounded like crap.
So, I just took it back to the AT&T store and got my money back again. A shame, really. Why is decent sound hardware really hard to come by these days? Do I have really too high expectations? But my benchmarks are not in the hi-fi department. I am using ancient Sennheiser HD-457 headphones, Shure E2C in-ears and some Plantronics USB headset. None of these things are in the high-end range, none of them cost a fortune. Is it really so much to ask for a wireless/Bluetooth headset that simply delivers the same quality?
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