Jabra Sport Pulse Review

The Jabra Sport Pulse offers a bluetooth headphone that wirelessly connects to your phone providing 5 hours of cord free connection for streaming music. The stand out feature is that the Pulse also can track your heart rate while working out when using the companion app. The ability to track your heart rate without strapping even more electronics or worrying about additional wires, chargers, and gadgets to remember next time we head to the trail was very intriguing.

At almost $200 they are pretty expensive, but as a dual purpose option the convenience might overweight the cost.

1. Jabra Sport Pulse Wireless earbuds
2. 4 sets of ear gels
3. 3 sets of EarWings
4. FitClip
5. Protective Zipper Case
6. USB cable
7. Jabra Sound App unique registration code
8. Quick Start Guide
9. Warranty information
10. Warning information
11. Register paper

The Jabra Pulse are very minimalistic, and the fit far outseeds other bluetooth in ear headphones.  Once they are in, they stay put.  If you have tried other in ear bluetooth headphones, you may have been frustrated with them falling out of your ear when they get sweaty, or when running.  The Jabra Pulse have a unique design that is very comfortable, even when wearing for hours and hours.  It is also extremely secure.

The inline mic and controls could have used some easier buttons to click.  As you can’t see the buttons when you are wearing the headphones, it’s often found by hunting around with your fingers, or tracing the cord from your ear down.  This can be difficult when wearing a helmet or biking gloves.  Additionally, we found that the remote can get caught on clothing and helmet straps which tugs on the ear piece.

The heart rate monitor is built right into the left ear bud. You hadly notice it is even there.  It’s mirrors the right ear bud where the micro usb charging plug is covered and located.

Jabra states that the heart rate monitor is as accurate as an ECG machine which seems to be the industry standard for measurements. While we didn’t test it against an ECG, we did manually check our heart rate, and the pulse was very close, and would feel comfortable trusting it for fitness purposes.

Beside a few bluetooth connections issues we couldn’t be more happy with the Jabra Pulse. Having used many other bluetooth in ear headphones, we found many features that just made the Pulse stand above the rest. On rare occasions a voice prompt will advise that heart rate was lost and to reposition the heart rate monitor in your ear. Wiggling the ear bud seemed to always solve this problem for us.

It seems that battery life is always an issue with any wireless device. There has to be a balance between bulk, features, and usage. The five hour battery life is at the very low we would count as an acceptable performance. If running a marathon, or on a century (100 mile) bike ride, you may find yourself finishing the race without music or heart rate monitoring. But for normally gym visits or runs around the neighborhood, 5 hours is enough to get you through a few workouts.

When compared to other bluetooth in ear headphones the Jabra seems to have an overall better sound. The highs, mids and lows all are projected well through the ear buds. With in ear buds, it seems like there is a lot of complaints around “Bass”, the lows sounded very good with the pulse and we think most users would agree that the sound quality is really good.

There was no distortion listening to a number of different styles of music and podcast. We streamed music from Amazon and Spotify as well as listened to videos and music on the phone. Any degradation in audio quality was a lack of bandwidth and not the headphones themself.

With the secure fit, passive isolation is very high. It’s very hard to hear anything around you even with nothing playing through the headphones.

While most bluetooth headphones don’t come with their own app. the Pulse has a great overall app for tracking fitness and fitness coaching. There are some gimmicks in the app but overall it works well.

Jabra has a Sound App specifically for playing music (Jabra Sound) as well as the sport app (Jabra Sport) for tracking. A nice british accent prompt you through the turned on features. The Sport app offers some great training information with the included heart rate charting. The setup request to capture your resting heart rate with a simple series of test. The workout app allows you to track activities like walking, running, cycling, skiing, etc. The app can guide you through workouts giving audible queues, or displaying real time information on the app. It also displays an indication of how much battery life is left. A countdown can get you started, displaying your bpm, duration distance, calories burned, pace, heart rate zone, average heart rate zone. There is also a map using gps to track your workout. One of our favorite features was viewing heart rate during different sections of trails to see where we were pushing it the most.

The app can also sync up to many music options like Jabra Sound, Spotify, iTunes, and Google Play.

The app provides a great amount of information useful to help you get the most out of your workout. There are built in Jabra Circuits that can guide you through a work out with various on screen and audible instructions to a circuit workout. This is great if you like to workout outside, or whenever you get a chance and are not always visiting a gym or on a treadmill. There are also options to turn on/off voice readouts of the statistics which is great for cycling and running when it’s hard to always glance at the screen, or if it’s buried away in a back pack.

We also found that the heart rate monitor will link up with other apps like MapMyFitness, although there were issues with it loosing connection more frequently with other apps.

Connection bluetooth is very simple. The first time the Pulse comes on in connection mode. With our android phone they were immediately recognized. The middle button of the remote will turn on and off the headphones, while the plus and minus buttons act as both volume and skip tracks depending on the length of the hold.

We couldn’t be more pleased with the Jabra Pulse headphones. They performed well on the trail, around the city, in the gym and on the couch. The sound quality won’t blow you away, but it is still very good, and above average of most other bluetooth headphones.

The form factor, design and overall options are everything we need (and a little more with the heart rate monitor) to keep us happy during a workout or just enjoying some private music session.