We teased you (and ourselves) a bit earlier with our miniature box of mystery, opening up the floor to anyone who wanted to guess what was inside. Though you guys made some great guesses, we can honestly say that it’s not a Palm Pre, Sidekick LX, or the next Android phone. In fact, it’s not a phone at all.
Tucked inside that small cardboard box and rushed to MobileCrunch HQ this morning was Aliph‘s latest and greatest Bluetooth headset, the Jawbone PRIME. They’ve brought over everything that made the last one worth while (the killer noise reduction, fashion-friendly look, and itty-bitty form factor), and improved it across the board.
Jawbone PRIME Features:
- NoiseAssassin 2.0: NoiseAssassin already rocked at cutting out all the crap last time around, but they’ve tweaked things to reduce noise in environment 6-9dB louder. That may not sound like much, but remember: decibel ratings are logarithmic. That’s somewhere around a 10x improvement.
- Acoustic Voice Activity Detector (AVAD): The Jawbone series has always relied on a small nub (called the Voice Activity Sensor) that touches your face to detect vibration. On past models, noise reduction and overall call quality would drop fairly sharply if this nub lost contact with your face. AVAD detects if the nub is still touching – if not, it enables a back-up noise reduction method which performs “as good or better than any other noise cancelling headset”.
- Wind Reduction: Wind + Headsets = suck. With most headsets, just stepping into a mild breeze makes it sound to the person on the other end like you’re beating eaten by some sort of demon. Jawbone PRIME takes two different audio signals, the two electret microphones (which, when up against wind, is still good at the high frequency signal) and the Voice Activity Sensor (which has the low frequency stuff down), and then combines the best parts of both on the fly. According to Aliph, this is “the beginning of Jawbone’s journey toward silencing wind.”
- Up to 4.5 hours of talk time
- Standby time of 8+ days
- Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR, 2.0, 1.1, 1.0
- Multipoint: Switch between up to 8 Bluetooth devices on the fly.
- Weighs roughly 10 grams
Like its predecessors, the Jawbone PRIME will launch with an MSRP of $129.99 in three colors: black, brown, and platinum. Additionally, they’re releasing a limited edition Jawbone EARCANDY line, which is essentially just the PRIME decked out in 4 ultra-bright colors: “Yello?” Yellow, “Frankly Scarlet” Red, “Drop Me A Lime” Green, and “Lilac You Mean It” Purple. Pre-orders begin tomorrow at Jawbone.com, and units will start hitting the shelves by May 2nd, 2009.
