Review: Jabra Cruiser Bluetooth Car Kit Speakerphone 9
Thu, 04 Feb 2010 3:52 pm EST
The Jabra Cruiser bluetooth car kit packs a bevy of technology in a sleek and shiny package. While far from innovative, the Jabra Cruiser is an adequate car kit and performs capably when paired with a Palm Pre. As you might imagine, adequate does not equal superb. The Cruiser just didn’t measure up to its price tag when it came to making calls.
Audio Quality
Under the glossy fingerprint magnet case of the Cruiser is a large speakerphone that emits sound through a large slit towards the end of the device. Strangely, this slit is angled such that it away from you when mounted onto a car visor. This odd placement makes for a clean aesthetic design, but it also means that the sound that you get on calls is first reflected off your windshield and dashboard before hitting your ears. The end result is muffled audio. If you can manage to find a way mount the Cruiser car kit so that the speaker faces you, then you’ll get excellent and clear sound, but then the controls are on the opposite end of the device and harder to reach.
As best as I could tell the dual microphones are also located inside this slit. Quite often callers reported distracting echoes of their own voice while I used the car kit, and a muffled transmission of my own voice. All-in-all, it’s good hardware, but the arrangement in the name of aesthetics compromises the design.
The Jabra Cruiser also comes with a built-in FM transmitter capable of broadcasting both call and music audio to your car’s stereo system. While an awesome idea in concept, the FM transmitter is hobbled by the same drawbacks that hinder the performance of dedicated FM transmitters. Namely, in urban areas such as my home of Cincinnati there are so many and so powerful radio stations broadcasting that it is near impossible to find a clear radio frequency for your own in-car broadcasting. And if like me you find yourself traveling to other metro areas, that radio band that is open at home may not be open where you’re going. Once an adequately clear radio band was found the Cruiser transmitted almost without fault, though it did seem to randomly skip every few minutes. While the FM transmitter is a nice touch, an aux-out port would provide much better audio clarity.
Controls
The buttons for the Cruiser are located in three spots: the FM button and a physical power switch (nice touch) are on the left side, the call button and music controls are on the top/front, and the volume rocker is on the right side. The call button behaves just like it would with any headset - tap to answer and tap to hang up. Jabra missed an opportunity to turn large speaker cap into an easy to actuate button, instead opting for the smaller and shinier top edge to serve that function.
The FM button does exactly what you might expect: it toggles the FM radio transmission on and off. The volume rocker switch is dual function; when working as a standalone it controls the volume output from the speaker, and when in FM transmission mode it changes the radio frequency.
While there are four lights up top to provide some feedback (battery, call, bluetooth/power, and FM), most of the feedback you’ll receive comes in the form of a robotic Australian woman. Since you should absolutely be keeping your eye on the road when driving, operating the Cruiser can be an exercise in patience - especially if you need to change radio stations.
In the Box
The Cruiser comes with a thin wire sun visor clip that provides an adequate half-inch of clearance. To ensure that it stays in place, the base also has a gripping pad that helps it stick in place when executing more exciting driving maneuvers (standard practice for any testing of car kits, I assure you). Included in the box are instructions in English, French, and Spanish, a Micro USB cable, and a 12-volt USB port auto charger.
Conclusion
Some of the design decisions made with the Jabra Cruiser bluetooth car kit make me wonder what the folks at Jabra were thinking. It could be a very good quality car kit and has comparable hardware with many other car kits on the market, but the choices made in the name of aesthetics cripple its capabilities. It’ll do the job, but for the price there are better designed car kits on the market.
The Jabra Cruiser Bluetooth Car Kit is available in the PreCentral Store for $89.95, a savings of 10% off the list price of $99.95.
Pros
Great speakerCons
Speaker faces away from caller
9 Comments
Got this one and does good for my music streams but yeah do hear reports from people say they hear their own voice on some calls.
What are the some of the better options?
Moto T505 is an excellent alternative if streaming music/podcasts is a necessary option. See my review in the forums.
Hmmm...this is an interesting review which leaves a lot of questions for me. In several podcasts you branded this unit as the holy grail of BT carkit speakerphones and now you rate it with 2.5/5 ???
I use the Moto T505 with the Pre and it works great. I already used it with my trusty Treo 755p without issues.
I've had the Jabra Cruiser for several months now (much cheaper @ Costco). I've had no issues with speaker placement that Derrek experiences. In fact most people have marveled that I'm on a speaker phone when the subject comes up.
The FM mode can be a pain. Moving it to the visor closer to the antenna when playing music on the Pre does the trick.
One point missed in the review but nice for we Pre/Pixi owners is the charging port uses the same micro-usb standard, so no gaggle of chargers in the car anymore. Thank you Palm for going the non-iPhone route there!
Yeah, I give this review 2 1/2 stars out of 5. Nothing about how long the battery (charge) lasts, nothing about fm sound quality when streaming music from the phone.
I have had this unit for about 6 weeks, and overall I am disappointed. I paid $80 for it on Amazon and had it next day (free shipping). The unit charges up within an hour or two and upon power up, it clearly states exactly what you need to do in order to pair your phone with it. Pairing was easy and I was making calls within minutes. Sound quality on my end was great through the speakerphone, and decent over the fm radio when listening to a voice call. People on the other end reported no echoes or any background noise (in fact, it was so silent on their end when they were talking they thought the call had ended). I did get the overall impression that they were having a hard time hearing me, as I felt like I had to speak louder than I would if the phone was right next to my ear. This fact alone has been enough over the course of using it that I have been discouraged from using the product. It is more comfortable and natural to just put the phone next to my ear, or take the time to plug in the pre's included headphones for making a call.
One odd thing that happened when I received my first call was the phone asked me if I wanted to share my contact information with the Jabra Cruiser. I was thinking, "great!". So I clicked ok and fully expected that when I received calls the "Australian Woman" would announce the name of the person who was calling. Not the case, as it only announced the number of the caller, as in "Call from -555-555-1212." On top of that, the announcement only came after the pre had rung about 3 times. By the time the lady rattled off the number, the phone was just about ready to send the call to voicemail. Not Cool!
There have been a couple of situations where the phone has not recognized and paired with the headset upon power up. I know another poster has commented on this. Turning off bluetooth and the device and powering back up quickly remedied the problem.
Another disappointment has been the sound quality over FM when streaming music from the pre. I am not able to tell if it is the fault of the headset, my car's fm stereo, or the pre streaming over A2DP. My car's stereo audio has always lacked a little with FM stereo, but sounds great with CD. When coupling the fact that the setup is streaming music from the phone to the carkit over bluetooth, and then the device is broadcasting the signal with (almost certainly) a very weak transmitter over fm to the car's stereo, the end result is a flat sounding, mono-quality sound that I would liken to listening to an mp3 file that was compressed to about 56kbps or lower. There was hardly any bass and the trebble levels were certainly not high enough for my liking. It is not so bad that I don't listen to music this way, and in fact it is just fine for listening to things like podcasts, old christmas music, or other low fidelity items that would sound the same if you were listening to them with your headphones anyways.
Battery life is exceptional, I can go for at least 2 weeks listening to music over fm and making/receiving calls before charging the unit. The included charging device is nice as it gives you the option to charge in your car or take the carkit inside to charge on the computer via the usb cable. The cable has ample length to extend from the car's cigarette ligher to the visor so there is no need to remove the device for charging. The fact that it charges with a micro usb means that you can also use the included cable as a secondary cable for your pre, or you can use your existing car charger for your pre to charge the carkit. I actually took the carkits cable and brought it into work as a way to connect my device to the computer there; simply using the phones charger in the car to charge the carkit.
The buttons function nicely for me. When listening to music stored on the phone or streaming from pandora, I can use the play/pause and seek buttons on the carkit to do just that. Don't like a Pandora song, just hit seek on the carkit and it goes to the next one. Need to pause it for a minute, hit play/pause, no problems. When listening to music and a call comes in, the phone functions just as it normally would, automatically pausing the music and allowing you to take the call, then resuming right where you left off when the call has ended. As my friend Borat would say, "Very Nice!"
Overall, I do agree with the rating this site's reviewer gave the product. I am not in a position to have tried any other products in this category so I cannot use any other expriences to help guide the writing of this review. I certainly do appreciate all the work the guys at precentral do; however, I would recommend actually using the product for a couple of weeks before writing a review like this and ensuring that it is complete with all the need to know information before posting.
I have not had any sound quality issues with my Cruiser. I've never heard an ehco and no one else I talk to with it has complained either and I usually ask them how I sound. I have a buddy who has the Motorokr T505 and he sounds terrible to me when he uses it. It is difficult to understand him and his voice sounds sort of high pitched.
I'll stick with the Jabra Cruiser.
I posted a review myself in the forums. While I did not notice many of the problems identified by Dieter (I thought audio quality was pretty good) I did have bluetooth problems with using A2DP. Had to regularly toggle BT on/off to get the connexion to work properly. In addition, none of the music controls worked consistently with the Pre. When I switched to Moto T505, all my BT problems disappeared!
For me, main reason for the switch was BT compatability and not audio quality.
Update: June 21 2010 - I've switched back to the Jabra Cruiser. The BT compatibility seems a little better (maybe due to updates on the Pre?) but nothing that the on/off switch won't fix. Primary reason for switching back was that I was tired of not have dual mics on the T505. Too much walkie/talkie talk for me. Nice to have the Jabra Cruiser back up and running. As I stated earlier, no audio quality issues for me at all, both using the onboard speakerphone and transmitting to the car's radio.