Jabra Headsets are a dumpster fire
I use a Jabra 65 headset at work. I have both the one-ear and two-ear variants because I’m still trying to debug my way through a complete shutdown of Bluetooth functionality for the last couple of months.
I think the one-ear one is more comfortable because I can hear the rest of the office a bit. The two-ear one is extremely deadening and fits oddly on my head. It’s very noticeable and not very comfortable.
Jabra popped up a dialog today asking me how likely I would be to recommend Jabra headsets to anyone.
Zero.
I am 0% likely to recommend Jabra headsets.
I commented the following:
“Look, it’s probably Windows just as much as your headset, but I can’t use Bluetooth anymore, not for months now. Even before that, the mic and speakers would just mute themselves in what, for me, are completely unpredictable ways. More than half of my conversations would start with “can you hear me?” or “I can’t hear you.” followed by fumbling with sound and mic settings and muting/unmuting things that aren’t muted in Windows, but are, apparently, muted in hardware. I wouldn’t wish this experience on my worst enemy.”
When I submitted my comment, it told me that the checkbox was “required”. I did fill out the checkbox; it’s unchecked. What they mean is that it’s required that I check the box that agrees to the following:
Rate Your Jabra Product Experience − junk mail required
“I agree to terms and conditions and that Jabra, its parent company can contact me by email or advertising with discounts, news, partner updates and surveys. Jabra stores my name and e-mail along with cookies and other identifiers in line with the privacy policy. I can unsubscribe at any time.”
If you happen to hover over the text, you’ll see that, although the words “terms and conditions” are not highlighted in any way, they are sneakily linked to the full terms and conditions to which you’re agreeing, but in a way that does not in any way encourage people to investigate those terms and conditions because you can’t tell that they’re linked, unless you go looking for it.
So, if I want to tell them how shitty their products are, I have to agree to get “advertising with discounts, news, partner updates and surveys” from a company I wish I’d never heard of. Capitalism is going great.
Today, my headset—connected via USB because Bluetooth is still broken—starting cutting out both the sound and the microphone for about ten seconds whenever a chat message arrived while I was in a call. In case I’m not being clear, this is how I picture this whole contraption.
- It is 2024.
- I am using the most popular operating system in the world (Windows).
- I am using a connection technology that is at least three decades old (USB).
- I am using a headset from one of the most popular manufacturers in Europe, if not the world (Jabra).
- I am using the video-chatting client provided by the maker of the operating system (Teams).
- The combination above is incapable of simultaneously streaming the video call and playing a 400ms sound without turning off the whole shebang and laboriously reconstructing itself over the course of ten seconds.
- It is 2024.
🤦♀️ 🤦♀️ 🤦♀️