Jabra Elite Sport
A near-perfect pair of wireless headphones
The earbutds sit (very) snugly in your ear canal and push the optical heart rate monitor against your skin
£229.99 from Jabra, jabra.co.uk Feat ures Bluetooth, wireless, Hear Through sound filter, companion app for analysis and coaching, waterproof (IP67)
The Jabra Elite Sports aren’t cheap by any means, but they promise so much. These things can track your run, monitor your heart rate, guide you to get stronger or push you to your max during a high-intensity interval workout.
Considering the Elite Sport earbuds are an excellent mixture of the Jabra Pulse (heart rate monitoring) and Jabra Coach (fitness coaching) headphones, and shed the wires to boot, these things could be big.
Actually, the Jabra Elite Sports are more than just big – they’re huge. The idea is good: they sit (very) snugly in your ear canal and push the optical heart rate monitor against your skin to supposedly give a pretty accurate heart rate reading. The app’s coaching system bases this fitness on your VO2 max (that is, your maximal oxygen consumption rate during exercise), and that’s a fallible measurement out of the box, requiring an unknown amount of runs to accurately give you a decent view of your actual fitness level. You’ll need to use the app at least three times a week for a month to get an accurate and usable training plan – it feels like a lot of effort, but if you put that time in then you should see the benefits. We did find that the VO2 max became more accurate every time we recorded more data.
To charge, you need to plug the buds into their anonymous-looking black case for an hour. You’ll get around nine hours of power from a full charge.
The in-box literature refers you to the app to pair the earbuds, although you can listen to music over Bluetooth without the app. You’re then asked to put in your vital stats to monitor health effectively.
We found the running tracking is good, but needs an iPhone – which makes sense given that the Elite Sports are just headphones. The cross-training tracking is okay too, with a good breadth of workouts.
No pain, no gain
There’s a huge range of tips and wings to give a decent fit, and while it takes a while to find the right ones, the fit really feels like the earbuds are in and staying put, no matter how vigorous your regime. Over time, though, that ear-filling fit becomes an issue.
We asked some colleagues to try them out, and after prolonged wear some felt pain radiating down from the ear to the jaw. Still, with repeated use, the buds do soften slightly, and experimenting with the different tips helps, but the fit takes a bit of getting used to.
The other irritation is the buttons. On the right, you’ll find the function button (that moves between the exercises in the crosstraining workouts) and the play/pause button. On the left-hand side are the volume controls; holding down either the up or down button will skip the current track. Again, as the earbuds are so large, changing tracks this way can be very uncomfortable. Touch-sensitive controls would have been a much better choice.
We’d have liked it if the Jabra Elite Sport were smarter, or at least had some built-in storage. A smart wearable that lets you run without your phone, and that stores your heart rate data ready to be downloaded on your return, is the Holy Grail of fitness.
The headphones offer workouts to follow, and these are varied, although it would be great to be able to customise them – the
Bodyweight Challenge incorporates five circuits but you have to press a button to kick off each exercise, which allows you to rest in between, rather than forcing you to crack on. Having said that, it’s impressive that spinning, hiking and cycling are all supported.
The ability to set your own workouts is welcome, although the process of doing this can be a little frustrating too – there’s no option to add a warm-up. When we initially started with the app, it couldn’t track repetitions, which was a massive pain for interval training – they had to be entered manually. However, after feeding back to Jabra, you can now track your repetitions of popular workouts.
Bluetooth performance was excellent, although the Hear Through option simply seemed to make vocals sound thinner, rather than allow much external sound to pass through. You can’t particularly hear people talking any better with it turned on or off. In fact, what you notice more is the wind whipping across the microphone and distorting the sound from time to time, so it doesn’t feel like a real safety feature that will let you both listen to your music and run without fear of being hit by a bus.
We’re both disappointed and impressed by the Jabra Elite Sport. The fit in the ear will not suit everyone – the heart rate accuracy wasn’t great at times, with the fit playing a big part in delivering the right data – and the price is high. But the ability to answer phone calls on the run is great – all you need to do is say “answer” when the call comes in and you can chat on the go. Voice and audio quality is good, and there’s a great volume of workouts and supported activities. If you hate wires, these are decent rivals to Apple’s AirPods.