Posted June 19, 2008
The Jawbone, from San Francisco tech start-up Aliph, has basically been the gold standard of Bluetooth headsets since its introduction in late 2006, thanks to a patented voice-activity sensor—fancy circuitry that identifies and isolates your voice and edits out extraneous background noise. Though it's been pretty much universally beloved by anyone who's ever tried one—it makes it so much easier for callers to hear you, particularly when you're on a noisy New York street—the problem is that the Jawbone was always just a little too bulky. That's why the new Jawbone is such a breakthrough: It's 50 percent smaller (its height is less than that of a dime, whereas the old Jawbone was closer to a quarter), weighs basically nothing (ten grams!), and is even more beautifully made (famed industrial designer Yves Behar is Jawbone's aesthetic czar). And really, the newly improved so-called NoiseAssassin technology is astonishingly effective. You're going to see a lot of these paired with the upcoming iPhone 3G (although the new Jawbone works with just about any old crummy cell phone with Bluetooth).

$129.99 at Jawbone.com.

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