Review: Jabra Talk 65 Headset

Sometimes something becomes invaluable for the simplest of reasons. And so it is with my Jabra Talk 65 headset.

The reason why needs a little preamble.

When we moved from the middle of the southwest forest here in WA to Australind, just out of Bunbury (WA’s second largest city), we went in theory from sparse communications options to full city access. In the forests (Quinninup to be exact), the nearest mobile tower was about 20Kms away and stuff like TV and internet were all satellite based. It really was the middle of nowhere (which the locals love).

This was pre-full scale NBN, but when we moved into the new house in Australind, we expected (and had booked 6 weeks before) ADSL. When we arrived there was nothing and it took a number of phone calls to Telstra to confirm this had happened as NBN was DUE to go in, but not completed as yet. Expected date? They didn’t know.

But in recompense, they gave me a terabyte free of mobile data, which would have been fine except the wireless modem couldn’t connect to it nor could any mobile phone we had. So it sort of defeated the purpose. Once again it turned out, despite now living in suburbia, the nearest tower was kilometres away.

We eventually got our NBN thanks to IPSTAR (who were also our satellite provider in Quinninup and have been brilliant) but mobile reception whilst a lot better, is still patchy throughout the house.

My office / studio at the front for example has no phone reception at all.

If my phone is in the kitchen (where there is a signal) and someone calls, the time to get to it from the office is enough that it is guaranteed to ring out.

See where I am going with this?

With the Jabra headset in place on my scone and Bluetooth connected, I can leave the phone in the kitchen and answer it when it rings no matter where I am. And of course make calls. It supports voice assistant too.

It has all the features you’d expect; 100m metre range, decent mic and earpiece, 14 hours talk time, noise cancelling etc etc, and at around $100 it’s a bargain.

The only thing I haven’t worked out is when I am in the car and streaming audio to Google Car Audio on my Pioneer head unit, it tends to take over and divert the audio stream from the phone to the headset instead. I am sure there is a fix, I just haven’t found it yet.