I am a big fan of hands free driving. That’s why I drive with my knees. Since I still want to keep my hands free from holding anything else, I always use a bluetooth headset, too. My latest is the very cool, lightweight, smaller than most, Jabra BT530. This earphone has very effective background noise suppression they call Noise Blackout. This allows the person on the other end of the conversation to hear your conspiracy theories unimpeded by the murmurs in the holding cell. On your end, the Jabra BT530 intelligently adjusts the volume level of the call to be constant, regardless of whether the person on the other end lowers their voice to say something horrible about someone in the room, or suddenly shouts expletives at you. The sound is quite good on both sides of the conversation.
One of the cooler features is an ingenious way to hold it in your ear. There are two ways to wear this earphone. The first is the standard over the ear clip which suspends the earphone in your ear. The second way uses a unique earpiece that has a soft rubber ring protruding from the the top of it. The ring fits into the fold in your ear above your ear canal and gently hold the earphone in place without the use of the ear clip. Both earpieces are soft and shaped like your ear and come in many sizes. The Jabra BT530 is so light that it is held secure and is comfortable. And it looks ever so sophisticated.
I have used the Jabra BT530 for over a week and I haven’t recharged it. It has a switch that turns it completely off, or after it loses the bluetooth connection for a while it goes to sleep. It has three buttons, one to answer, make calls and hang up, and one each for volume up and down. This makes the Jabra BT530 very easy to use.
Another unusual feature is the ability to upgrade the firmware. This unfortunately did not go so smoothly. When I finally got the update into the Jabra BT530 it failed on the last step. Oddly enough, it did successfully update the earphone and it seemed to sound better. Support was nearly non existent. When 3 days later they responded, they just told me to return the Jabra BT530 for a new one. One last warning, almost every page of www.jabra.com starts with blasting annoying music with no way to shut it off on most of them. Don’t you hate when that happens?
Inspiring conversation: Good sound, lightweight, very nice design.
Disconnect: Awful support, blaring music on website.
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Written by Jeff