As hard as Aliph might try with its Jawbone range, Bluetooth headsets are unlikely to ever be cool – regardless of the nice new finishes and brilliant sound quality, using one in public outside the comfort of your car will never fail to make you look, well, odd.
But Aliph’s not one to give up and its latest design-led headset is the new Jawbone Icon. In an interesting effort to pigeon-hole various customer groups, Aliph has created six different Icon designs with varying finishes and colours all named after characters from some kind of film-noir-comic-book escapade. For example, we’ve got The Hero, The Bombshell, The Rogue and The Thinker – one for each of the X-men then. In place of the traditional flashing lights and morse-code-esque beeps, each personality comes with voice notifications in character. These let you know things like how much battery life is left and the phone number of who is calling. We can’t wait to try this out, it sounds hilarious.
The Icon is quite a lot shorter and chunkier than Aliph’s previous offering, the Jawbone Prime, making it a more subtle but less elegant headset. The audio technology inside remains much the same, with the Noise Assassin noise cancelling tool for clear calls. The Icon also comes with volume equalising so that loud or quiet callers will be evened out to a comfortable, safe level for your ears. For some unfathomable reason, Aliph has also launched a kind of app store for the headset called MyTalk – we’re not sure if this’ll be UK or what it is exactly.
The Jawbone Icon is out now in US for around £60 – we’ll let you know as soon as it’s UK-bound.
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