Pros & Cons
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- Tiny.
- Great voice quality when close to the phone.
- Charging case doubles as backup battery.
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- Severe garble issues when phone was in bag while testing.
- Little noise cancellation.
- No physical buttons.
Jabra's Stone line of Bluetooth headsets has placed design over performance for a few years now. That trade-off appears once again in the Jabra Eclipse ($129.99), a cute little headset with a comfortable fit, but difficult controls and troubled voice quality. You'll get a lot more for your money with our Editors' Choice, the Plantronics Voyager 5200 ($49.99 at Walmart) .
Design and Battery
The Eclipse ($59.99 at Amazon) is the best-looking headset I've seen recently. Nestled in a two-inch-wide matte egg of a case, it's a lone black eartip with a 1.75-inch, slightly angled boom coming off of it. It comes with four different-sized pairs of gel eartips, but I found the default one snug and very comfortable. That said, if you insist on an earhook, this isn't your headset.
The headset lives in its egg-like case when you're not using it. It charges in the case, which has a standard micro USB port and serves as an external battery. The little headset itself lasted for 3 hours, 44 minutes of talk time in our test, but the case holds two extra charges. A smartphone app, Jabra Assist, lets you monitor battery status from your phone and helps find the headset if you've misplaced it (it shows you a map of where it was last seen and makes it beep if it's in Bluetooth range).
Performance
The Eclipse is terrific as an in-car headset. With your phone close by and in clear line of sight, sound is very clear and voices are rich, with a depth that I didn't hear in other headsets. This is especially noticeable with music.
Unfortunately, voice quality breaks down quickly when you put the phone in a jacket pocket, especially when it's across your body from the headset. The Eclipse also doesn't do well in noisy street situations: There is almost no outbound noise cancellation, so a passing bus eradicated my voice on the other end of the call.
I also had real trouble with the touch controls. You can ignore or answer calls, or trigger your phone's voice dialing system, by tapping or double-tapping on the headset. But it isn't clear where on the headset you're supposed to tap, which I found really frustrating. I greatly prefer a physical button. There are also no volume controls, so that must be controlled from your phone.
The Eclipse's range isn't spectacular, but it's decent. Transmissions start to break at about 30 from the connected handset, and completely fade at 50 feet.
Conclusions
I love the Jabra Eclipse's small, attractive design, but its trouble maintaining a radio signal means it's a less useful Bluetooth headset than it otherwise could be. Our Editors' Choice, the Plantronics Voyager 5200, has much better range, but it's very large. If you're set on a smaller headset, we recommend the Plantronics Explorer 500 ($44.95 at Amazon) instead.