Why You Can Trust CNET Jabra Go 660 review: Jabra Go 660
Those who need both softphone and smartphone connectivity out of their Bluetooth headsets will be well served by Jabra's combination Go 660 set.
Design
The Go 660 combines Jabra's EXTREME Bluetooth headset — and yes, Jabra does spell it all in caps, presumably unaware of how odd one looks shouting into a Bluetooth headset — along with a USB LINK 320 Bluetooth dongle for those PC systems that lack Bluetooth. The basic idea is that the headset, which can pair with multiple sources, can be used to pair with your Bluetooth-enabled mobile as well as a desk-based softphone client. The use of the USB dongle isn't mandatory if your system already supports Bluetooth, but as long as you've got a spare USB port, any system should be upgradeable. The USB dongle is largely unremarkable save for the fact that it's rather bulky. We've seen truly tiny Bluetooth dongles before, and if you popped this in the side of an older non-Bluetooth-compatible laptop, it would stick out a lot.
Jabra Go 660
The Good
The Bad
The Bottom Line
Features
Like many Bluetooth headsets, the Go 660 features noise-cancelling technology that utilises multiple microphones to clarify your spoken word. Jabra's take on noise cancellation is called "Noise Blackout". The headset itself comes with multiple comfort fit bands and caps, but we found it essentially ready to go out of the box. It charges via micro USB, but no direct AC charger is supplied in the box. Instead, you get a car cigarette adapter and a tiny micro USB to A-Type USB plug with a stiffly rotating head for charging from a standard USB port. The headset itself can pair with up to eight devices, although it'll only actually work with two of them simultaneously.
Performance
Pairing the Extreme headset with multiple devices is much like pairing any other headset, from powering it on and detecting turn by turn with each device. We combined testing between an iPhone 3GS, HTC Touch Desire HD, an iMac and a Windows 7 PC. We did hit some quirks with initial pairing, and not surprisingly it won't pair with two smartphones at the same time.
Call quality from various sources was mostly good. There's an obvious problem with testing any mobile device for call quality as factors outside the headset can affect the actual call, but in our tests all respondents could hear us clearly and we could hear them.
There's an obvious small to medium-sized business case for something like the Go 660, but Jabra's marketing materials also suggest that you can and should use it for internet radio and music streaming. In terms of audio streaming, we can't deny that the Extreme headset works, but like most small speakers, it's both tiny and tinny at the same time. If you like music with any clarity, this isn't an option you should actively pursue, but if there's absolutely no other alternative, it'll suffice as a very low quality option. The one thing that testing with streaming music did afford us was the ability to do some distance testing with the headset, and here we were very impressed. Quality dropped noticeably, but we could still listen to music from two rooms away from our test PC, and that bodes well for more general phone use if you're likely to get up and away from your phone for any period of time.