Windows Phone Thoughts: The Long Trek to a Jawbone review...

Getting a Good Fit
The Jawbone is one of the few Bluetooth headsets which provides a variety of options for getting a good solid fit. Believe me, getting it to fit right is important to ensuring it works as advertised. A number of personal reviews (found on PriceGrabber) have shown many people are finding it difficult to get a comfortable fit for their Jawbones and of 'dropouts' when talking to people. (There is a reason for that little white button on the bottom of the unit which touches your cheek!) After playing with various combinations of the earloops and earbuds on both ears for a couple of weeks, here's a process I found that works for me.

First, if your Jawbone came with an earloop inserted, take it out. Working with the Jawbone unit and each of the earbuds, try various combinations in each ear until you find one that will stay in the ear by itself, with no other support. Make sure it stays in place when you gently rotate your head and feels comfortable. Also, ensure that the little white voice actuator button is touching your upper cheek at all times.

Now, based on which ear you've got your Jawbone in, take the appropriate earloops (right or left). Remove the Jawbone from your ear, and try each of the loops, by themselves, over the ear. Feel free to bend the metal parts of the loops (gently!, since I hear from other sources that they are a bit brittle) to make it fit flat against your ear. The metal post where the Jawbone is attached should be across the hole in your ear.

Finally, put the earloop and Jawbone back together and try it for fit. In my case, it takes a bit of wrangling to get it on, but once it's there, it feels comfortable and sits well on the ear and against the top part of my cheek.


Figure 6: Here's what it looks like on my face. Notice that it sits pretty high up on the cheek.


Figure 7: Here's what it looks like from the front. Sorry about the elongated head – blame my phone camera. As you can see, from the front, the headset is barely noticeable and not too geeky :-).

Unfortunately, none of the buds fits 'into' my ear properly, so I can't really get the snug fit I was hoping for, but it seems to work fine and stays in place while I'm riding.