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Aliph and Plantronics in ears race escalation

April 23, 2009 4:41pm
by Chris Nuttall

It’s an ears race rather than an arms race, but the contest for the coolest and quietest Bluetooth headset has just been stepped up another notch with new releases by Aliph and Plantronics.

San Francisco-based Aliph brought forward the launch of its Jawbone Prime to today, apparently to coincide with the release of the Plantronics Voyager Pro.

Aliph has made this category sexy with its Apple-quality designs and clever packaging. It appears to have gone for Apple’s “nano-chromatic” approach with the vibrant “Earcandy” colours available for the Prime, ranging from “Blah Blah Black” to “Lilac You Mean It.”

Other than the colours, the design seems identical to its predecessor, the Jawbone 2, apart from a subtle line added to help users feel for the controls better.

The big improvements are in the software - reducing wind noise and improving its “NoiseAssassin” noise-cancellation algorithms further.

I have always wondered what is taking operators so long to get to CD-quality voice conversations on phones, and Hosain Rahman, Aliph chief executive and co-founder, says he is doing his best to achieve this at either end of the conversations - we just need the network in-between to shape up now.

“We want to give users in-person audio quality which is the ability to have a conversation like you and I are having here without any noise in the background,” he told me in a face-to-face interview.

The Prime has “Multipoint” Bluetooth functionality, which means up to eight devices can be paired at the same time. So if the phone rings while you are using the headset in a console’s online gaming session, the Prime switches automatically to answering the call.

“This gets into it being an audio gateway into that digital communications world,” says the co-founder, hinting at future categories for this one-product company.

The Voyager Pro has better wind noise performance than the Jawbone 2, according to one review, suggesting it is closely matched with the Prime. However, it lacks the sleek looks of the more popular Aliph product.

Bluetooth itself has been given the seal of approval for an upgrade this week. The 3.0 specification unveiled by its Special Interest Group on Tuesday will increase speeds by more than 10x due to the addition of 802.11 Wi-Fi technology.

This will make Bluetooth far more useful for large file transfers, such as moving video wirelessly from a PC to a portable media player.

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April 23, 2009 4:41pm in Hardware, Mobile, Software | Comment

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