Putting you on speaker
Jawbone’s Big Jambox is a Bluetooth speaker
that doubles as a hands-free phone kit. It’s a foot-long slab of weighty aluminum
mesh with rubberized ends. On top are thoughtfully shaped rubber buttons for
controlling music playback, adjusting volume, skipping tracks and answering
phone calls.
Finished
in red, graphite or white, the Jambox looks snugly upholstered but it’s really aluminum
mesh
Inside are pair of proprietary acoustic
drivers and dual bass radiators, as well as a mic. There’s also a lithium-ion
battery, which is good for up to 15 hours playback.
You can connect any device with a 3.5mm
headphone jack to the Big Jambox, using the included cable, but that would be
missing the point. Jamboxuses the Bluetooth Advanced Audio Distribution Profile
(A2DP) to allow you to play music wirelessly from an iOS device or Mac. Setup
is beautifully simple. Charge the Jambox, turn it on, and a voice tells you,
very loudly, that it’s in pairing mode. Select Bluetooth in iOS and up pops the
Jambox. Tap it and it connects first time.
Once it’s paired, you can makes calls from
an iPhone and select the Jambox as the source in the Phone app. We found that
calls were clear at both ends, but quality deteriorated at the other end when
we moved more than a couple of feet from the Jambox’s mic.
Audio quality when listening to music was
mixed. From an iPhone, low-frequency tracks with lots of warm bass, such as The
XX’s VC R and Marvin Gaye’s Inner City Blues sounded great. Higher-frequency
songs, particularly those with lots of electric guitar, such as Endless
Boogie’s Smoking Figs in the Yard, reproduced poorly: plenty of volume, but the
treble was shrill. From a Mac, audio quality was very poor, but that’s probably
down to Bluetooth rather than the speaker.
Even on an iOS device, if you listen to a
lot of music, you won’t want to use the Big Jambox as your primary speaker. And
therein lies the rub. At $416, you’ll want to use it more than occasionally.
Spend a bit more and you could have a very good Airplay speaker (although
AirPlay is limited to iTunes on a Mac and the Music app in iOS).
The Big Jambox is stylish, well built, easy
to set up and we want to like it very much. However, there are so many options
for listening to music from a Mac, iPhone or iPad that it really has to deliver
on audio fidelity. To our ears, it just doesn’t do that enough to warrant its
price tag.
Information
Price $416
inc VAT
From .com
Info jawbone.com
Pro Well-built
* Doubles as speaker phone * Easy to set up
Con Audio
quality not up to scratch
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