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  Wall Street

  17 years ago

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  The wireless Jawbone is a sleek, futuristic-looking gadget made by a small San Francisco company called Aliph. It will be sold, starting Dec. 21, for $120 by Cingular Wireless. The earphone will work with any Bluetooth cellphone, not just those on Cingular's network. Aliph will also sell the new Jawbone on its Web site, www.jawbone.com. The Cingular model will be silver colored. Aliph will offer it in red and black, too.
  
  What makes jawbone special is its noise-cancellation feature, called Noise Shield. You can stand in front of a blaring boom box or a weed whacker with a Jawbone, and its technology, derived from military research, will almost entirely obliterate that background noise. You can also hear the other party better.
  
  This effect is achieved through multiple small, built-in microphones, including one that rests against your cheek, detecting the vibration of your voice through the bones in your face. The gadget uses that reading to help identify and cancel all other sound that isn't your voice.
  
  In my tests, on a Palm Treo from Verizon and a Samsung Blackjack from Cingular, the Jawbone worked well. On a downtown street, it silenced the sound of traffic and crowd noise. In an office, it blocked out loud music only a few inches away. The noise cancellation is far better than on any other cellphone headset I've tried. Battery life is up to a decent six hours.
  
  But there are two downsides to the new Jawbone. First, it can't defeat wind. Even a mild breeze made Jawbone calls noisy. Second, it has some user-interface problems. The same button that turns the Noise Shield on and off also raises and lowers the volume, and the beeps of the two are hard to distinguish. I also found it hard to get a comfortable fit, though the unit comes with multiple behind-the-ear loops and rubber earbuds.
  

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  MD

  17 years ago

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  ....hmmm, interesting. VP, Creative director, and owner of his own firm...

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  Tumor Boy

  17 years ago

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  That's interesting. First Scott Wilson takes a director role at Motorola this year doing bluetooth and "everything not a phone" and now Yves does the same or at least doing headsets. Can either really offer an impact in that product category? Regardless, I would still not be caught dead looking like an *!$hole in a headset. Also interesting that both have companies outside their corporate jobs. Is this a new trend in design in the US? So Euro.

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