Pros & Cons
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- Clear earpiece tone.
- Aggressive noise cancellation.
- Rugged design.
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- Tinny transmission quality.
- Difficult to fit in small ears.
- No physical volume buttons.
Does the world need a rugged Bluetooth headset? What does that even mean? The Jabra Steel ($99.99) is military-spec tough, and it comes with an intriguing array of fit options. In terms of price, size, and sound quality, it fits between the lower-priced options we've tested and our Editors' Choice, the Plantronics Voyager 5200 ($49.99 at Walmart) . It's a solid bet if you often need to wear your headset outdoors, or if you're simply looking for aggressive noise cancellation.
Design and Fit
The Jabra Steel ($65.83 at Amazon) is a Bluetooth headset in the classic mold: It's a rubberized black stick about two and a half inches long. It has large, tactile on/off, call answer, and voice command buttons. For voice commands, it uses your phone's built-in voice assistant, although the headset itself can read out caller IDs with names.
It pairs via NFC or through a standard Bluetooth pairing process, and can be used with a smartphone app, Jabra Assist, which shows the headset's battery life and reads out texts. It also helps you locate the headset if it's lost by showing you a map of where it was last seen and making it beep if it's within Bluetooth range.
The headset is resistant to dust, shock, and water, and comes with a five-year warranty. It has large buttons you can tap even with gloves on. There's no volume button, however, so you have to control it from your phone.
One of the Steel's most appealing features is its array of fit accessories. There's a bright yellow latex eartip, but also a tip-plus-hook that seats the headset more firmly in your ear, a big over-the-ear hook, and a windsock to go over the boom in extremely windy situations. If you have smaller ears, though, this is not the headset for you: The half-inch circumference of the unit's speaker is much larger than other headsets (especially the tiny Jabra Eclipse ($59.99 at Amazon) ), and won't fit securely in small ears.
Performance and Conclusions
Because the Steel is designed for extreme situations, noise cancellation is aggressive. That makes for very good background noise cancellation, but tinny transmissions and a clear but trebly voice tone in the earpiece. There's none of the richness you get with the noise cancellation-free Eclipse. The Voyager 5200 has the best balance of the headsets we tested.The Steel has about 40 feet of solid range, and works when your phone is put in a pocket across your body with just a bit of computerized garble, but nothing nearly as bad as the Eclipse. It got an average 4 hours, 12 minutes of battery life in our tests; you recharge it using a micro USB port on the body.
If you work outdoors or in a loud, wet area—a kitchen, maybe—the Jabra Steel is the Bluetooth headset for you. It's also a great choice if you're looking for serious noise cancellation, but don't like the big, over-the-ear fit of the Plantronics Voyager 5200.
Jabra Steel Specs
| Product Category | Bluetooth Headsets |