Jabra Sport Coach Review – Wireless Earbuds (w/ Powerbeats2 comparison)

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You’ll start hearing voices in your head…

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Jabra Sport Coach Review – All the benefits of a personal trainer without the cost

Today we’re going to do a review of the Sport Coach by Jabra. These are Dolby bluetooth headphones that are integrated with Jabra’s own Sports Life fitness app.

The Sport Coach fits quite comfortably and aren’t quite as finicky to deal with like the Beats Powerbeats2 but they will get in the way of certain exercises. They are one of the better sounding wireless headphones that we’ve used which is great and Jabra has built an interesting app to use with these bluetooth headphones. The only thing that was disappointing with the Jabra Sport Coach was our unmet expectations of the TrackFit Motion sensor.

For our Jabra Sport Coach review, we’ve given these bluetooth earbuds a score of 4.2 Eh’s out of 5. We prefer these headphones over the Powerbeats2 as they scored 2.7 Eh’s out of 5 and would definitely recommend them to anybody looking for a pair of great sounding, great fitting headphones to get sweaty with.

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Fit/Comfort – The Jabra Sport Coach WILL fit

In terms of fit and comfort, Jabra includes a plethora of different plugs and doohickeys to ensure that these earbuds fit properly in your ear (they’re actually called eargels and earwings). For Aaron, he stayed with the medium eargels and earwings as larger eargels would pop the headphones out of his ears and the larger earwings would not stay on. The headphones are comfortable to use for hours at a time as Aaron didn’t feel any discomfort using them 2 hours at a time.

Jabra includes a clip to keep the cables from getting in the way but there isn’t one configuration that works for all types of exercises.

If you wear these headphones without using the clip, you’re going to find that any exercise that requires you to rack a bar will pull the headphones out of your ears. Now you can do what the model in their marketing material did and put the cable on top of the rack but that seems silly. Or you could just use the clip that Jabra includes to basically tie up the cables to the back of your head but be warned, this setup will force the headphones out of your head after a couple of head turns which doesn’t happen if you let them hang free so depending so choose your setup wisely.

Charging these headphones is done through a micro-usb plug and prior to this review, we upgraded the firmware on the headphones by connecting it to our computer through the micro-usb plug.

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Compatibility – Plays well with others but works best with the Sport Life app

Now at the beginning of the video, we mentioned that the TrackFit Motion sensor wasn’t as awesome as Jabra makes it out to be as it doesn’t track your reps. When we first got these headphones, our first impressions was that it would track  reps because there was a motion sensor and an app that looked like it would count reps. It doesn’t do any of that.

Despite this letdown, the Sport Coach will track your steps, cadence, distance, pace and calories burned which is great for exercise that cover distances like biking and running but most of these metrics are sort of useless for a cross-trainer where you’re being pretty stationary but don’t fret, Jabra’s Sport Life App is still pretty useful.

In terms of app compatibility, the Jabra Sport Coach can be paired with a variety of different fitness apps but the main focus of the Jabra Sport Coach is Jabra’s own Sport Life App. We wouldn’t go as far to say that the headphones are useless without the app but Jabra’s done an ok job of making the two different products work together.

On the left earbud, there’s a button that functions as the start/stop button for all the exercises that you can do through the Sport Life App. For the cross-training portion of the app, it basically allows you to tell the app when you’re done the allocated number of reps which you still have to count yourself. Its simple and it works.

As a side note, since there’s no other place to put this, one of the most unique things about these headphones is the voice that tells you that you’re “connected”. Its an oddly attractive female voice…

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Practicality – Great for the gym

In terms of practicality, these headphones only have battery life for 5.5 hours of continuous use so you’re not going to be spending all-day with them. They come with a carrying case so they can easily go in your gym bag but exercise is really the only place we would use these headphones. Again, we gave these wireless bluetooth headphones a score of 4.2 Eh’s out of 5.

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